Increasingly, I find that I fit neither left nor right, as it’s conceived in the United States. I’m not even a libertarian.
I’m not surprised.
People have a relationship to language that I find puzzling and foreign to me. Even repugnant. It’s an instrumental view. It’s also a very fundamentalist and dogmatic view.
Words are much more complex than that. To fit our narrow ideologies into them, we have to drain them of their power, their ambiguity, their richness – all the ways in which they don’t mean what we say. They never do. And bless them for that. Bless them that they always escape us. As experience always escapes us.
I am not a progressive, if progress means latching on to every idiotic scheme that flatters its manufacturer’s vanity at the expense of hard-won experience.
I am not a conservative, if conservatism means mistaking your own prejudices and ignorance for immutable truths.
I am not a libertarian, if liberty is a theory that you force on the reality of freedom and unfreedom.
I am not a pragmatist, if pragmatism is simply opportunism disguising itself as prudence and state craft.
I am not an extremist, if extremism is driving a good idea into insanity by literalism.
I am not a moderate, if moderation means selling your conscience to mass opinion.
Large parts of public debate are simply stupid, in the broadest sense of that term.
First, they are stupid, because many of the people engaging in them aren’t smart. Sorry. It’s just so – they aren’t people who’ve subjected themselves to any discipline besides saying whatever they think at the moment, unrestricted by expertise, criticism, reality, history, memory, conscience, or anything else.
Journalists simply aren’t true professionals in many respects and don’t have standards equivalent to the legal or medical profession. The IQ necessary to practice journalism of any kind isn’t that high. Writers generally tend to be smart people, because it takes a high level of intelligence to sustain an argument through the length of a book or through a good academic paper. But most journalists write little reports of 5-8 paragraphs – most of it on the order of “he said,” “she said,” and “then so and so did” – and sometimes they don’t even get around to doing that.
Second – public debates have become stupid, because there’s too much chatter going on. And the quality of things tends to deteriorate when the quantity goes up. Good ideas get taken up by dumb people and at the end of it, the good idea isn’t recognizable any more as good…or even as an idea. It turns into a slogan, an idiocy, and it tends to produce idiocy even in intelligent people who take it up.
Third – public debate is stupid because ideology tends to make us stupid. It requires us to strait-jacket our thinking, to look through a particular lens, to read only our side sympathetically, to pick winners and losers competitively.
Words have their own destiny. They are not our pawns or hostages.
Oh Lila! Yes the enlightenment was at best the province of very few people two centuries ago and even a smaller fraction now. Our president speaks to the “Mulim World”, we get worked up over gay marriage and the academy awards. Its so much nonsense but alas it has always been such. The problem in either the ortegan, menkian, or plain reasonable person is not that idiots and idiocy abound its that the idiots and idiocy have taken over and set the pace and the tone. The masses and mass sentiment have taken over. Yes, its an elitist view (oh now political lingo) but the plain realiy is that what you lament has steadily been going on in the west for some time and happened to the Arab World centuries ago and well on it goes…..The romans had barbarians we have multiculurualism where no idea or notion can be advanced lest somebody be offended so its a crazy tower of babel. Strip aside the decorations of legal lingo and sotomayor is about revenge and grievance, strip aside the nonsense about humiliating people by asking their citizen status to vote and you get the fact of getting thousands of amerindians to vote for your candidate in exchange for promises and spanish advertisments. On it goes…..
I leave you with a couple of thoughts..
Read Toynbees 11 Volume Study of History. The academic historians hated it so take it as a vote of confidence. Its all there-and even India and China are covered. Reread Musil–you will feel better, Menckens notes on Democracy will also make you feel better as will Hoffer and Ortega. Rent Idiocracy for laughs. Drop me a line–lets write a book
I leave you with the sage of Baltimore:
My guess is that well over eighty per cent of the human race goes through life without ever having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before, and by thousands.
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable. The pressure of ideas would simply drive it frantic. The normal human society is very little troubled by them. Whenever a new one appears the average man displays signs of dismay and resentment, The only way he can take in such a new idea is by translating it crudely into terms of more familiar ideas. That translation is one of the chief functions of politicians, not to mention journalists. They devote themselves largely to debasing the ideas launched by their betters. This debasement is intellectually reprehensible, but probably necessary to carry on the business of the world.
One more thing on language–its democracy and mass educations handi work of debasing ability and skill. On NPR they are astonished to find that Indian Americans (kids with parents from India typically) are winning a lot of spelling bees. Could it be the focus on reading and hard work and discipline and supplementing with Kumon and not trusting the ability of schools?
As for language, there is no doubt that we are in a post literate age. Its about passion not truth or details. Withouth clear language there is no clear thought and withouth math there is no clear thinking..
Read letters by U.S. civil was soldiers–they write with lucidity, clarity of language and a nuanced language possed by perhaps harvard professors today.
Read the Memoirs of Ulyses S Grant and then try to convince me that any general, president or media/academic figure can produce anything even close…..
Techmological davnace has not equaled human or intelectual freedom or improvement for the masses.
Yes – or if you read Farrand’s history of the debates in the Constitutional Convention – the number of classical references, the clarity and complexity of the sentence structure of the average politician.
But you know, there are many excellent journalists, purely in terms of writing ability, now. But the way they think is not smart – it’s, sorry, stupid. Pandering. So I wonder if this isn’t a side effect of being in a polyglot society – there are so many different people and cultures and schools of thought you can’t offend, so you have to water down everything you say or qualify it to death, or just say banal things that no one could possibly object to, and state them in the broadest possible way –
such as, we need to change, hope is coming to America, let’s all work together…
Who could object to any of those things..no one.
Yet, they don’t say much and they let you do a lot of dreadful things too..
Sorry – I think I’m having an Ecclesiastes moment.
Brava Miss Lila! for your intelligent refusal to become a member of the crowd.
It is strange in America – a place of deep fracturing and fissures and lack of community, on the one hand, and on the other – great conformity.