How Long Can We Sustain Permanent Outrage Culture?
The world isn’t made of blood allies and nemeses
The world isn’t made of blood allies and nemeses
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I’m a reporter by trade, so I’m used to strangers calling me an ignorant liar . What I will live and die and never, never understand, though, is why we get so much glee from attacking people we otherwise agree with. I know it happens a lot, but I want to tell a quick story and take it apart.
I have a Substack (please subscribe!) where I try and write something short every(ish) week and link to other stories I’ve written or podcasts or whatever. Last week I wrote this:
Increasingly I want to grab friends and shake them and tell them that I pretty intentionally don’t watch Rachel Maddow and certainly don’t want to hear a recap from them. This isn’t a dig at her in particular, but polemicists aren’t good for politics. Listening to them is a step below reading the headlines and feeling as if you’re informed.
It was part of (what I thought was) a larger point about whether politics should be for forcing people to do what you want or for finding a better way to live together. I think it should be the latter.
I chose Maddow because my readership skews liberal and I hate television news and political commentary. It runs on the kind of permanent outrage that I think is counterproductive at best.
Also, I was being a little polemical myself. Writing that I don’t need to hear people rehashing, say, Sean Hannity would have just gotten nods of agreement. My aim was to undermine scorched-earth thinking. Still, I was surprised by an angry email.
The Poor Ain’t So Bad
It started with this: “When we call Rachel a polemicist on a par with liars like Tucker Carlson, we do the truth and ourselves a terrible disservice.”
“Rachel?” Also: why Tucker Carlson? He wasn’t mentioned anywhere in my story. Are those the only two lenses for viewing American politics?
I guess they are if you watch infotainment, and I think we’d be happier if we just didn’t do that. I don’t want to participate in that part of our culture because I think it’s counter to being able to live together a little more happily.
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It took way too many back-and-forth emails before I gave up. The last email I read ended like this: “When you say a reporter is the same thing as a shill you’re destroying journalism.”
Ouch. I didn’t know I had to choose between preaching for MSNBC and destroying journalism. That’s a lot of responsibility for one guy.
What was disappointing, though, was the reminder about how love-it-or-leave it has crept into the left. It reminds me of “History of the World, Part I” where an aristocrat gets sent to the Bastille for saying, “The poor ain’t so bad.”
Creeping Tribalism
In recent years the notion of affiliation has given way to something much more tribal. For some reason people seem to feel like we either agree completely on everything or we have nothing in common at all.
I just wish we felt like there was an alternative between parroting “Rachel” and flying a Nazi flag. I’ve been struggling to find that middle ground for a while.
I am not saying anyone is in a cult.
I am not saying anyone is in a cult.
I am not saying anyone is in a cult.
There Aren’t Any White Hats on the Internet
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In my book about an internet cult, I took a look at why churches were emptying out. This is a historical fact that pre-dates the 9/11 attacks but certainly has picked up steam in the last decade. At the risk of being too self-referential, I want to share a but of that here.
Very few people believe everything their religion claims. They just believe enough of it that they would rather be in the church than not. It’s a tie to family, friends, and a wider spiritual life, even if you do have the occasional pepperoni pizza on a Lenten Friday. When people change churches or religions, it’s because the rules for participation require too much of them. I don’t think this is a novel insight, but when applied to [the internet cult] it takes on a different dimension.
It was easy for me to sum up the religious right this way. They don’t want to be among people who only believe most of what they believe. For some people, belief is an all-or-nothing proposition, and with eternal damnation on the line, that almost makes sense.
For me, it reveals the fragility of their beliefs. The closer a person gets to living in a black and white world, the harder they have to work to maintain it. Under those circumstances, it isn’t just easier to limit your point of view, it is critical.
All faith, whether it be in the power of God to smite a homosexual-accepting world or in the unfiltered truth from a television personality, takes more work than most people are willing to put in. Instead, we trade self-criticism for strongly held axioms. We list our beliefs so we don’t have to examine them.
Progressives and Intellectual Exhaustion
I honestly wonder sometimes whether my atheism is just rooted in intellectual exhaustion. I’ve always understood faith as a process of constant testing, of how hard a person is willing to work to be sure what they know in their heart is true.
I’ve said before that figuring out how to be good is dicey enough without also matching it up with what God supposedly wants depending upon who you ask.
Progressivism appealed to me because it seemed boxless. There was this notion (and maybe it was just in my head) that we were all people with fears and wants who should try and live together with a minimum amount of strife.
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Labels were for the small-minded, as was appealing to God’s rules. For me, being progressive was about a constant running critique.
Progressive rhetoric started feeling a little self-righteous in the run-up to the War in Iraq. By the time Trump left office it sounded an awful lot like the reactionary moral certainty I always associated (maybe naively) with people on the far right.
It’s as if they (we?) recognized that building consensus wasn’t working and abandoned it for the up-or-down approach that had made the right so politically successful.
Watching people I thought were my allies give up the center and abandon critical faith for immutable truths doesn’t feel different from people changing churches rather than examining their beliefs.
We’re in real danger of becoming a culture that cannot and will not stand for critique or conversation. At the risk of sounding hypocritical, if that happens the right will have won, but at least we’ll still have television personalities to give us the gist on why they’re evil.
Tony Russo is a journalist and author of “Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult.” Subscribe to his Bagel Manifesto here.
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