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.