Most USAians think they are super smart. It’s kind of like being sophomores in the history of the world. We think we know everything. We bragged about what our rambunctiousness produced. But now we stopped making stuff and we think that being a weasel is our way out of everything. The new term for this weaselness is disinformation. And now we have retreated into bubbles babbling weasel phrases amongst ourselves in chat rooms.
Rudyard Lynch has a podcast called History 102. Rudyard is wise beyond his 24 years and approaches history from an anthropological angle. I was listening to the latest topic that he discusses with his co-host Austin Padgett. “Explaining the Age of Neo-Liberalism”. They explore the breakdown of society and bemoan the reality that nobody talks to each other anymore. Rudyard makes the observation “If you can’t talk about it, you can’t think about it.” These guys are addressing our current predicament of taking the same “facts” and coming up with two or more competing film stories.
One big reason for these muddled narratives is that we don’t engage in dialogue except amongst people who we agree with rather than at “a town meeting” or cafe or watering hole where one must look neighbors in the face and try to make a point and to try to see their point. The French, on the other hand, have their cafe society. They do their duty as citizens by talking “politics”. (“Politics” is a discussion, not a shouting match, of the way we wish to live our lives and what we enjoy and what gives our lives meaning). The French leave work and go out to a cafe and argue about life and art. They engage in conversation and often use dialectics in search of clues to the mysteries of life. Or at least that’s the way it used to be. When I was in grad school, after play rehearsal we would go to a bar, order pitchers of beer and discuss how we would save the world through art. When I did Off-Off Broadway theater in New York City, we would adjourn to Peter McManus’ Irish pub around the corner from the theater and argue about the choices our characters should make. We loved to look at all the angles and the contradictions.
But somewhere along the line those personal confrontations became fewer and fewer and didn’t seem to translate into our public lives as citizens. Historian Christopher Lasch in his book “Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy” has a chapter called “The Lost Art of Argument”. In it he writes that “what Democracy requires is vigorous public debate, not information. Yes, we do need information but information that is “generated only by debate.” So, he takes the “information revolution” and turns it on its head. Information in and of itself is worthless without being debated. “Information, usually seen as the pre-condition of debate is better understood as a by-product.”
And how do we gather these clues? By asking questions. We take our ideas and subject them to somebody else’s arguments. If we passionately engage with the eagerness to learn, we may instead of changing somebody else’s mind find that we have changed our mind. So, we must listen carefully and be willing to challenge our own beliefs and to say “Maybe what I believe may be wrong.” How exciting and far less dull than passively taking in information from some newspaper or from so pundit.
Lasch gives a shout out to the social historian Ray Oldenburg’s “The Great Good Place” and with Oldenburg mourns the passing of the local watering hole, the cafe, the hair salon, the soda fountain steps and other places between work and home where conversations used to flourish. These were places like the soda fountain steps where kids listened to their fathers debate a local policy with vigor and good-hearted disagreement. Those places where professions mingled as equals are hard to find in the suburbs, but they still exist in small towns and big cities. I was lucky to spend many years in a small town where wisdom came from caring for cows and not from a book. Democracy dies if we hide in cul-de sacs furtively taking anxiety meds as we peer out of the drawn blinds or retreat to cocktail parties or book clubs where everybody is of the same class and tows the party line “Four legs good. Two legs bad”. So, I suggest this year that you get out and find a Cheers bar in your neighborhood or even better, a Star Wars bar and strike up a conversation with somebody who may see things differently than you do. If you don’t have one of those, then go to the nearest town that has one and adopt it as your own. And for heaven’s sake don’t get your information from a newspaper. You can get your questions there though.
Stop Preaching and Start Talking: “The Lost Art of Argument”
Most USAians think they are super smart. It’s kind of like being sophomores in the history of the world. We think we know everything. We bragged about what our rambunctiousness produced. But now we stopped making stuff and we think that being a weasel is our way out of everything. The new term for this weaselness is disinformation. And now we have retreated into bubbles babbling weasel phrases amongst ourselves in chat rooms.
Rudyard Lynch has a podcast called History 102. Rudyard is wise beyond his 24 years and approaches history from an anthropological angle. I was listening to the latest topic that he discusses with his co-host Austin Padgett. “Explaining the Age of Neo-Liberalism”. They explore the breakdown of society and bemoan the reality that nobody talks to each other anymore. Rudyard makes the observation “If you can’t talk about it, you can’t think about it.” These guys are addressing our current predicament of taking the same “facts” and coming up with two or more competing film stories.
One big reason for these muddled narratives is that we don’t engage in dialogue except amongst people who we agree with rather than at “a town meeting” or cafe or watering hole where one must look neighbors in the face and try to make a point and to try to see their point. The French, on the other hand, have their cafe society. They do their duty as citizens by talking “politics”. (“Politics” is a discussion, not a shouting match, of the way we wish to live our lives and what we enjoy and what gives our lives meaning). The French leave work and go out to a cafe and argue about life and art. They engage in conversation and often use dialectics in search of clues to the mysteries of life. Or at least that’s the way it used to be. When I was in grad school, after play rehearsal we would go to a bar, order pitchers of beer and discuss how we would save the world through art. When I did Off-Off Broadway theater in New York City, we would adjourn to Peter McManus’ Irish pub around the corner from the theater and argue about the choices our characters should make. We loved to look at all the angles and the contradictions.
But somewhere along the line those personal confrontations became fewer and fewer and didn’t seem to translate into our public lives as citizens. Historian Christopher Lasch in his book “Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy” has a chapter called “The Lost Art of Argument”. In it he writes that “what Democracy requires is vigorous public debate, not information. Yes, we do need information but information that is “generated only by debate.” So, he takes the “information revolution” and turns it on its head. Information in and of itself is worthless without being debated. “Information, usually seen as the pre-condition of debate is better understood as a by-product.”
And how do we gather these clues? By asking questions. We take our ideas and subject them to somebody else’s arguments. If we passionately engage with the eagerness to learn, we may instead of changing somebody else’s mind find that we have changed our mind. So, we must listen carefully and be willing to challenge our own beliefs and to say “Maybe what I believe may be wrong.” How exciting and far less dull than passively taking in information from some newspaper or from so pundit.
Lasch gives a shout out to the social historian Ray Oldenburg’s “The Great Good Place” and with Oldenburg mourns the passing of the local watering hole, the cafe, the hair salon, the soda fountain steps and other places between work and home where conversations used to flourish. These were places like the soda fountain steps where kids listened to their fathers debate a local policy with vigor and good-hearted disagreement. Those places where professions mingled as equals are hard to find in the suburbs, but they still exist in small towns and big cities. I was lucky to spend many years in a small town where wisdom came from caring for cows and not from a book. Democracy dies if we hide in cul-de sacs furtively taking anxiety meds as we peer out of the drawn blinds or retreat to cocktail parties or book clubs where everybody is of the same class and tows the party line “Four legs good. Two legs bad”. So, I suggest this year that you get out and find a Cheers bar in your neighborhood or even better, a Star Wars bar and strike up a conversation with somebody who may see things differently than you do. If you don’t have one of those, then go to the nearest town that has one and adopt it as your own. And for heaven’s sake don’t get your information from a newspaper. You can get your questions there though.
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Posted in Bar Codes, Social Commentary, The Cowgirl Contrarian
Tagged communication, disinformation, Lasch, politics, saloons