In the second episode of HBO’s Watchmen series, Angela Abar, also known as Sister Night, explains a few things to her adopted son, Topher. (...) Some people think that world is rainbows and lollipops, Angela tells Topher. But “we don’t do lollipops and rainbows. We know those are just pretty colors that hide what the world really is.” And what is the world really? The world is “black and white.”
More and more of us seem willing to share in Sister Night’s wisdom. There is black and there is white; there’s right and there’s wrong. No lollipops, for sure, and no multi-toned rainbow zones, either. As a nation and a people, we are what the pundits like to call “polarized.” We are divided, radically and insistently on any number of matters: abortion, immigration, race, the politics of gender, homosexuality, or transgender rights. We’ll even fight about who’s going to use which bathroom. For many, if not most of us, it seems there is no going back and no backing down. Right is right; wrong, wrong. What more is there to say?
Every issue is manifest in extremes. Someone is not “racially insensitive” if he laughs at a dopey joke. He’s a racist out and out. Pose questions about the motives for gender transition? You’re a transphobic, and that’s all there is to say. Don’t believe all women all the time when they discuss sexual assault? Misogynist.
It works both ways. Question the president’s fitness to lead? You’re disloyal. Maybe you’re a traitor. Ask moderate questions about abortion rights and join the ranks of the baby-killers. Insult the military, refuse to honor all the police all the time: Maybe you’re not a real American.
Not only have our opinions become more emphatic and violent, served up like roundhouse punches. We’ve developed a proclivity for suppressing the opinions of others. We cancel. We de-platform. Some of us stage a riot even before hearing the scheduled talk by the controversial speaker. We will not risk our own simplicities by exposing them to the views of others. Direct, clear, and emphatic is what we aspire to be, making our pronouncements from the judge’s elevated chair.
What’s up with us humans, us American humans, that we’re committing ourselves more and more to unbending postures? Why have we developed what seems an allergy to nuance, complexity, irony?
One answer might be that the world has grown radically complex—perhaps unbearably so, for some of us. Or at least it has taken on the appearance of boiling complexity. Information comes our way at an unprecedented speed and in unprecedented amounts, through our various technologies. Step into the world of the Internet and you can see how much blooming, buzzing, laughing, teeth-gnashing, mind spinning confusion is on offer.
It’s natural, isn’t it, that we would revert to simplicities and reductions in the face of all this whirl?
Another reason for this state of our culture is what could be called the pleasures of judgment. The more affairs threaten to run out of control, the more it may help to have not only a firm position but also a judgmental temperament. Judgment brings order. We go thumbs-up, or we go thumbs-down, and so appear to rule our own lives in imperial fashion. When we judge emphatically, it seems that the world is our domain. Simplification (which we might also call “reduction”) and judgment: These are the ways we hold complexity at bay.
The Internet? We shape our tools, Marshall McLuhan famously said, and thereafter our tools shape us. The most powerful tool of our time is the Internet, which McLuhan would probably call an extension of the mind. (To McLuhan, tools are always extensions of the human: A shovel extends the hand; a steam-shovel is a super-extension. The mind is made larger by the Internet, but it is made more confusing, too.) We’re not being shaped by this tool so much as we are being mis-shaped by it—confused, disordered, maybe slightly deranged. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be with a tool as marvelous as the Internet, but that appears to be the way that it is. (...)
Is the Internet chaos? It may approach that condition. But the Internet is also a collaboration (if we follow McLuhan), a collaboration between the mind of the individual and the scattered, revealing, often invaluable pseudo-mind of the technology. A person takes of two things, says Chaucer, that which he finds and that which he brings. To use the Internet well, you need to bring a lot. You need an existing cognitive and (dare one say it?) spiritual frame to order what you learn there. You need to know some history, and preferably more than some. It helps to understand the rudiments of philosophy, religion, economics, and science. You have to have an education, in other words, to be educated by the Internet. You need to have created a context for what you know and what you might learn. You also need to have standards for what to believe and what not to. A built in bullshit detector, a la Ernest Hemingway? Nothing so emphatic, but surely a strong, functioning sense of skepticism. To be educated by the Internet, you first need to be educated by something other than the Internet.
by Mark Edmundson, Hedgehog Review | Read more:
More and more of us seem willing to share in Sister Night’s wisdom. There is black and there is white; there’s right and there’s wrong. No lollipops, for sure, and no multi-toned rainbow zones, either. As a nation and a people, we are what the pundits like to call “polarized.” We are divided, radically and insistently on any number of matters: abortion, immigration, race, the politics of gender, homosexuality, or transgender rights. We’ll even fight about who’s going to use which bathroom. For many, if not most of us, it seems there is no going back and no backing down. Right is right; wrong, wrong. What more is there to say?
Every issue is manifest in extremes. Someone is not “racially insensitive” if he laughs at a dopey joke. He’s a racist out and out. Pose questions about the motives for gender transition? You’re a transphobic, and that’s all there is to say. Don’t believe all women all the time when they discuss sexual assault? Misogynist.It works both ways. Question the president’s fitness to lead? You’re disloyal. Maybe you’re a traitor. Ask moderate questions about abortion rights and join the ranks of the baby-killers. Insult the military, refuse to honor all the police all the time: Maybe you’re not a real American.
Not only have our opinions become more emphatic and violent, served up like roundhouse punches. We’ve developed a proclivity for suppressing the opinions of others. We cancel. We de-platform. Some of us stage a riot even before hearing the scheduled talk by the controversial speaker. We will not risk our own simplicities by exposing them to the views of others. Direct, clear, and emphatic is what we aspire to be, making our pronouncements from the judge’s elevated chair.
What’s up with us humans, us American humans, that we’re committing ourselves more and more to unbending postures? Why have we developed what seems an allergy to nuance, complexity, irony?
One answer might be that the world has grown radically complex—perhaps unbearably so, for some of us. Or at least it has taken on the appearance of boiling complexity. Information comes our way at an unprecedented speed and in unprecedented amounts, through our various technologies. Step into the world of the Internet and you can see how much blooming, buzzing, laughing, teeth-gnashing, mind spinning confusion is on offer.
It’s natural, isn’t it, that we would revert to simplicities and reductions in the face of all this whirl?
Another reason for this state of our culture is what could be called the pleasures of judgment. The more affairs threaten to run out of control, the more it may help to have not only a firm position but also a judgmental temperament. Judgment brings order. We go thumbs-up, or we go thumbs-down, and so appear to rule our own lives in imperial fashion. When we judge emphatically, it seems that the world is our domain. Simplification (which we might also call “reduction”) and judgment: These are the ways we hold complexity at bay.
The Internet? We shape our tools, Marshall McLuhan famously said, and thereafter our tools shape us. The most powerful tool of our time is the Internet, which McLuhan would probably call an extension of the mind. (To McLuhan, tools are always extensions of the human: A shovel extends the hand; a steam-shovel is a super-extension. The mind is made larger by the Internet, but it is made more confusing, too.) We’re not being shaped by this tool so much as we are being mis-shaped by it—confused, disordered, maybe slightly deranged. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be with a tool as marvelous as the Internet, but that appears to be the way that it is. (...)
Is the Internet chaos? It may approach that condition. But the Internet is also a collaboration (if we follow McLuhan), a collaboration between the mind of the individual and the scattered, revealing, often invaluable pseudo-mind of the technology. A person takes of two things, says Chaucer, that which he finds and that which he brings. To use the Internet well, you need to bring a lot. You need an existing cognitive and (dare one say it?) spiritual frame to order what you learn there. You need to know some history, and preferably more than some. It helps to understand the rudiments of philosophy, religion, economics, and science. You have to have an education, in other words, to be educated by the Internet. You need to have created a context for what you know and what you might learn. You also need to have standards for what to believe and what not to. A built in bullshit detector, a la Ernest Hemingway? Nothing so emphatic, but surely a strong, functioning sense of skepticism. To be educated by the Internet, you first need to be educated by something other than the Internet.
by Mark Edmundson, Hedgehog Review | Read more:
