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.
It was another cold, dark, and howling night in Little Twig, Montana. No longer below zero, the wind had picked up again and slapped Daphne in the butt as she literally blew into the saloon. At the end of the bar in his usual spot stood Cowboy Clay with his Chardonnay. Carl nursed a whiskey a seat down from where Clay stood and Soot was to the right of Clay also sipping a whiskey. One bar stool next to Carl was open and Daphne slid in and threw off her long down coat. Claudia had already poured her a glass of Sauvignon Blanc and set it down in front of her. Daphne pulled out her cell phone and placed it on the bar.
Daphne: I waiting for one more call and then I’m done for the day.
Soot: I’m getting rid of my cell phone. We never needed them before. Why should we now?
Clay: Well what happens when you get stuck in a ditch?
Soot: Well, maybe I wouldn’t have gone anywhere where I’d get stuck with no way of telling anybody where I am. Maybe these phones just cause people to be reckless. What did ya think about that?
Carl: You could be right, Soot.
Clay: I don’t know. I think people are going to be stupid whether they’ve got a phone or not.
With that the first round of the Philosophy Club finished and it was on to the next round. Continue reading →
After a long and frustrating day of baling hay (too wet, too dry), my husband goes to town for some beers. There he usually runs into an assortment of fellows who will invariably give him the latest shocking examples of evil government doings gleaned from somewhere in the Fat Cat News.
“The IRS is gonna charge our athletes $9000 for winning a gold medal!” a wizened fellow exclaims.
“That ain’t right. Gud dam gubmint ” grumbles a guy in a green cap as he slams his beer glass down on the bar, “Why they are fighting for us over there.”
“Get the ropes! String ’em up”, two more guys yell out as the crowd now becomes tense and restless, grumbling about lack of good swinging trees because of the gd tree huggers. Continue reading →
Continuing my series on Bar Codes and Saloon Life, I went to check out the annual Yellowstone Boat Float. Last night was the start of the Boat Float where young people man rubber rafts, fishing boats, makeshift vessels made of oil drums and plastic bottles. It’s a three day drinking affair. Every night they land their vessels and drink some more, listen to bands, and get arrested. The town folk come to watch. And sometimes it is dangerous and there is always somebody that gets in trouble on the river or at the parties. Ah Jack London would be in heaven.
“In the saloons life was different. Men talked with great voices, laughed great laughs, and there was an atmosphere of greatness. Here was something more than the common-every-day where nothing happened. Here life was always very live, and, sometimes, even lurid…Terrible [saloons] might be, but then that only meant they were terribly wonderful…In the same way pirates, and shipwrecks, and battles were terrible; and what healthy boy wouldn’t give his immortal soul to participate in such affairs?”
And lo and behold, there was very much a pirate theme to many of the rafts. Pirate flags flew proudly in the wind. Pirate hats adorned many heads. There were Indians and Vikings. There was a guy packing some heat. Of course some of this dangerous behavior was undercut by a lot of cute dogs some with their own life vests and some with, yes, pirate hats and Viking horns.
I’m still editing some movies of the event, but until then here are some pictures to enjoy.
I picked up a book at a student book store in New Orleans because it’s title leaped out at me. “Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon 1870- 1920” by Madelon Powers. It’s an academic, well foot-noted but not dry analysis of the saloon culture that arose in the U.S. with industrialization. Various middle class progressive reformers like the “Committee of Fifty” comprised mostly of clergymen and academics studied this culture partially to figure out how to create substitutes for it. They tried to take the energy of the informal working groups in saloons and shovel them into union halls and temperance tearooms. But the saloons prevailed until prohibition. They served as a way of self-organization and a way of integrating into American life. They followed a tradition that Alexis de Tocqueville noted earlier. He called it “the art of association”. He observed that Americans seemed obsessed with material acquisition and individualism. The only thing tempering this dangerous self-interest was their equal tendency to form voluntary associations. And Powers includes saloon life as a form of voluntary association much like joining lodges, political parties, church groups, and Social Aid and Pleasure clubs like the ones that still exist in New Orleans. Continue reading →
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