You Shadow Boxers, Toiling in the Twilight

“We left – onto the freeway shoulders – under the tough old stars. In the shadow bluffs I came back to myself. To the real work, to ‘What is to be done.’” – Gary Snyder, I Went into the Maverick Bar

I want to double back to a conversation that was we were having earlier this week regarding how we choose to approach one another in political discourse and the use of snark in that discourse. I came in for some criticism for agreeing with Sonny Bunch that Freddie’s interaction with Robert Stacy McCain, while McCain was certainly due for a take down, was unhelpfully snarky and ad hominem ridden.

In response to E.D.’s defense of snark, Max Socol wrote,

And how many more people have read that post, than would have if it was a mild-mannered suggestion? Drama sells.

Right, I guess it depends on what we understand our undertaking to be when blogging. To get this out of the way, I did not suggest that Freddie’s response needed to be mild mannered and the idea that if one doesn’t riddle one’s comments with snarkiness and ad hominem attacks it is therefore “mild mannered” strikes me as going a bit far. What I said was,

And please don’t misunderstand me to be saying that we can’t get into good vehement rows over important issues, because that isn’t the point of this lamentation. Some of the best conversations I’ve ever had and some of the best interactions that I’ve been privy to online have also been the hardest hitting.

So, look, civil and mild mannered are not the same thing. By all means, avoid pulling punches, but leave the name calling in the sandbox where it belongs and focus your take downs on the substance of the person’s arguments.

But I think this notion that “drama sells” is worth some considerations as well. I don’t know what Max feels like he’s doing when he writes at Some Political, but from my perspective the point of creating this site wasn’t to sell anything, it was to engage in a group writing project that focuses on generating the quality discussion, debate, and analysis in a longer, and therefore more in depth, format. I take that project pretty seriously because I’m of the opinion that such a sustained discourse is something that is of benefit, generally speaking. I understand that Max is using a figure of speech when he says that drama sells, but I can’t help feeling like that kind of sensationalizing in blogging is both present and  precisely part of the challenge to which Bunch was pointing and with which I was agreeing.

Now, one might be inclined to look at me and suggest that I’m just taking myself too seriously here, and I suppose that to some degree such a person would be warranted in that analysis. After all, as commenter to my original post Dan noted,

After all at the end of the day this is still just the internet. We are not dealing with detailed policy positions that require polite discourse to bring out the best in each sides argument. We are all reading this to be entertained. We read to be educated as well, but lets face it, in the art form that is blogging ones ability to entertain is paramount to all other skills.

Right, well part of my perhaps over-seriousness has to do exactly with this attitude about blogging “just being on the Internet”, which is to say that I often think we don’t take ourselves seriously enough and I’m railing against that tendency. I think this isn’t just true of our interactions on the Internet, though, generally speaking it seems increasingly like people just don’t take their actions very seriously and don’t have much of any inclination to consider the consequences of those actions. There is a certain glibness and flippancy that seems to pervade our contemporary analysis that I happen to find troubling, not the least of which because we face some pretty significant challenges that would benefit from a certain degree of seriousness, determination, and certainly from an all-hands-on-deck attitude.

Every time I hear or see someone blowing off the importance of their actions, be they large or small, I am reminded of a chunk of dialogue from one of my favourite movies, Waking Life. In it, former philosophy professor at the University of Texas Robert C. Solomon (RIP) talks about his value of existentialism (emphasis mine),

The reason why I refuse to take existentialism…
as just another French fashion or historical curiosity…
is that I think it has something very important to offer us for the new century.
I ‘m afraid we’re losing the real virtues of living life passionately,
the sense of taking responsibility for who you are,
the ability to make something of yourself and feeling good about life.
Existentialism is often discussed as if it’s a philosophy of despair.
But I think the truth is just the opposite.
Sartre once interviewed said he never really felt a day of despair in his life.
But one thing that comes out from reading these guys…
is not a sense of anguish about life so much as…
a real kind of exuberance of feeling on top of it.
It’s like your life is yours to create.
I’ve read the post modernists with some interest, even admiration.
But when I read them, I always have this awful nagging feeling…
that something absolutely essential is getting left out.
The more that you talk about a person as a social construction…
or as a confluence of forces…
or as fragmented or marginalized,
what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses.
And when Sartre talks about responsibility,
he’s not talking about something abstract.
He’s not talking about the kind of self or soul that theologians would argue about.
It’s something very concrete. It’s you and me talking.
Making decisions. Doing things and taking the consequences.
It might be true that there are six billion people in the world and counting.
Nevertheless, what you do makes a difference.
It makes a difference, first of all, in material terms.
Makes a difference to other people and it sets an example.
In short, I think the message here is…
that we should never simply write ourselves off…

The idea that “what you do matters” rings through my head on a daily basis and I try to live into the truth there revealed to the best of my ability. I also happen to be of the opinion that waiting to take that truth to heart until you’re faced with big decisions is to completely miss the point. The idea that what you do matters means that even the smallest decisions you make matter and that you ought to bring a degree of mindfulness and a sense of responsibility into those decisions to the best of your ability. Though we would all like to believe that if tested in a big way we would do the responsible thing, life generally demonstrates that without practice this is often not the case. The practice, then, occurs in the little decisions we make, the day-to-day items that seem banal at the time.

So sure, flaming some jerk on the Internet might not seem like a very big deal, but its an opportunity to practice how you approach and engage people on much bigger issues and in much more important situations. It was Aristotle who first suggested that virtue isn’t something we’re born with, it’s something we learn by being around and observing the actions of virtuous people and practicing virtuousness ourselves.

As per all of this stuff just taking place on the Internets, it strikes me that the Internets seems increasingly like the destination for much of our discourse. As the newspaper and magazine industry continues to fail and more and more people turn to the Internets as their source for information the participants in our little discussions are going to increase. So I’m inclined to suggest that those of us who are already here have a certain responsibility to make this space as conducive to productive discourse as possible.

Which brings us back to snark and its place in political discourse. I can grok what E.D. is getting at when he suggests that a certain level od snark has useful applications in our machinations. And Will Collins makes an excellent point when he motions to this tasty bit of snarkiness by Brian Beutler and asks: what about the importance of good clean fun?

Sure, yes, snark has its place and my previous post, as well as this one may understandably lead readers to believe that I don’t take this to be the case. I do, and Beutler’s well laid indignation makes me chuckle as much as anyone. My concern though, and what motivates this post as well as my agreement with Bunch is that as far as online discussion goes, snark is becoming the rule not the exception. Snark seems to increasingly becoming our de facto mode of comunication and in that regard it fails to be well laid in any meaningful sense or useful to civil and substantiated discussion.

My own opinion is that when we default to engaging one another through snarkiness we cease to actually engage one another and focus on ripping apart the ideas, which often cash out as misconceptions, we have about one another. One person thinks that because they’ve read one line or paragraph of writing by another that he/she knows who that person is, what they’re all about, and why they need to be taken down a notch, and so they go about doing that thorugh snark. The person being addressed takes offense at being so quickly categorized and goes about doing the same thing to her interlocutor as a defensive tactic.

In short, we start chasing each other’s shadows, and any back and forth that ensues winds up being a sort of shadow boxing that has little to do with the actual state of affirs but is rather two human beings locked in a rhetorical and psychological  battle trying to achieve the upper hand. Not only does that strike me as juvenile, but more importantly it inhibits those people from actually having a real rhetorically pugalistic exchange of ideas. Everybody is so busy shadow boxing that we never actually get to the main event. And we desperately need to get to the main event.

Look, as previously mentioned, I think that we face some incredibly significant challenges that require our attention in a full-bodied manner. But I think we also have to recognize that there are some real differences in perspective that exist in people’s social and political outlook that result in disagreements of substance. Those disagreements are a good thing by my lights because they provide alternative analysis on those various issues and so a discussion designed to flesh out those differences and bring them into relation, as I described here, helps to give us a better overall view of what exactly we’re dealing with and what the possible ways forward might be. None of which happens when our default communication style is set to snark. And yes, I do think that cultivating such a discussion online is an important goal, so just because we dialogue over the Internet doesn’t mean that the above shouldn’t be our goal.

At the end of the day what I’m really looking for is a greater degree of sincerity in our interactions. I’m not saying we should always agree, I’ve argued the benefits of just the opposite. And I’m not saying there isn’t room for snark, I’m just worried that it is overtaking our means of communicating with one another on important issues. I’m not saying we have to always be nice to one another or ensure our contributions are all mild mannered, I’m suggesting that we lay into each other with a certain degree of sincerity and an undercurrent of respect, especially for those with whom we disagree most vehemently.

In a world that increasingly ironic, sarcastic, and cynical, I don’t think asking for more sincerity is such a bad call and without it we seem destined to sink deeper into the sink holes we currently find ourselves.

As Snyder suggests, in the shadow bluffs we must come back to ourselves. To the real work, to “What must be done.”

Update: as circumstantial evidence of the blogosphere’s increasing influence in political discourse, consider how many bloggers show up on Forbes’ list of the 25 Most Influential Liberals in the US Media.

Tagged as: communication, differences, political discourse, sensationalizing, shadow boxing, sincerity, snark