We have newspapers for all hours of the day. A clever head could still add a few more. This way everything, what everybody does, wants, writes, even what he plans, is publicly exposed. One can only enjoy oneself, or suffer, for the entertainment of others, and in the greatest rush, this is communicated from house to house, from town to town, from empire to empire, and at last from continent to continent. - Goethe
"We moderns... possess nothing which is truly ours," - Nietzsche
I found this article difficult to write, most of all because if I even sound like I am going to say something against our culture or something against Obama, I will be accused of racism, hatred, insane and various other false epithets. That's how low we have come. So I will just preface this article in the following manner. I am not a republican nor am I even sure of who I will vote for. I am not trying to bash anyone. I am simply describing what I see.
Okay, now to continue to exercise my freedom of speech:
The other day, I was having a conversation with some friends about the current economic crisis. Everyone has their own interpretation of what has happen. Joe has his point. Sally has hers. Jack has his. So what else is new? Whether you are sitting in the old Athenian agora back in the days of Socrates or whether you hang out in a modern day college campus student union, you are going to find numerous opportunities for hearing various forms of opinion. Opinion is everywhere. It is part of what makes us human.
Now the opinions around the 2008 Election are different from the opinions I have experienced in any other election cycle. One of the differences that it holds is the power of what is called Social Networking, whether that be through sites such as Facebook, Twitter or blogging sites. The presence of these have given people many more opportunities to view opinions and distribute their own, all at the click of a mouse. What I have found both fascinating and disturbing is the Twitter Election web site, which allows you to see political opinions fly right by, one after the other. On the website, Twitter describes what this site is for:
We’re filtering hundreds of Twitter updates per minute to create a new source for gathering
public opinion about the election and a new way for you to share your thoughts.
"Gathering public opinion". But for whom and for what? If you read the opinions nearly all of them are pro-Obama and positively virulent against anything anti-Obama. The unusual thing about Twitter is that one can publish ones opinion in public without having to be responsible for it. In other words, unlike in a book or a magazine article or in a blog post, a twitterer doesn't have to defend or elaborate what he says. He just says it, it gets digested by people and then it disappears.
Unfortunately, in that conversation I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, I have not been able to maintain the same level of conversation I used to have during my high school and college years, mostly because I have found people have become so religious about their positions, conversation concerning them is almost near a waste of time. That simple line in the beginning of Plato's republic comes to mind:
"Well, if we will not listen, how will we be persuaded." (Republic)
Whether you are a person who arrives at your opinions through research or careful thought, or whether you arrive at them through parroting a news article through the opinion of your friends, it does not matter in today' conversation. Generally, the one who holds the most common opinion well seem the most correct. I have had that conclusion made to my face: well, since Obama is leading the polls, he must be good. Again, funny enough, Plato's Republic comes to mind, where, in a prelude to a discussion on Justice, a gang of youth are trying to get Socrates to not leave them:
But do you see, he rejoined, how many we are?
Socrates: Of course.
And are you stronger than all these? for if not, you will have to remain where you are. (Republic)
Jack Dorsey, the CEO and founder of Twitter, is the source and fan of this form of communication. He goes so far as to say that one could argue that it has more honesty than something well thought out and considered.
I consider myself a man of few words and I really like conciseness, succinctness, and laconic speech, and I just find a lot of value in those short bits of information, and those small details that are not composed. Because, I think there is less abstraction. It takes time to compose oneself, so you could argue that there is more value, and more honesty, in spur of the moment commentary instead of something that's really thought through and considered. I've always been drawn to that form of communications.
Well, Jack, one could argue that point. However, that would probably be less honest than just making the point, as you indicate yourself. Nonetheless, Dorsey was onto something here. He is simply articulating a very common opinion that those who use thought and reason are somehow manufactured or false. That opinion can find its source in the works of 19th century philosophers such as Nietzsche, even though Nietzsche did not mean to launch a war on profound thinking, since he practiced it himself.
But in whomever and wherever you find the source of anti-intellectualism, you will find that it had its full flowering in the 1960s with thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida and other progressives.
Interestingly enough, Nietzsche made use of concise and succinct speech in his writings through the use of pity, but profound aphorisms. Now these were not the opposite to "really thought through", these were the expression of a strong, but nimble soul. But what would Nietzsche himself think of Twitter? One can only guess based on his thinking around mass media (newspapers):
The bulk of the German's daily reading material can be found, almost without exception, on the pages of the daily papers and the standard magazines. This language, its continual dripping -- same words, same phrases -- makes an aural impression. For the most part, the hours devoted to this reading are those in which his mind is too weary to resist. By degrees the ear feels at home with this workaday German and aches when, for any reason, it is not heard. But, almost as an occupational hazard, the producers of these newspapers and periodicals are the most thoroughly inured to the slimy journalistic jargon. They have quite literally lost all taste and relish, above all, the absolutely corrupt and capricious. This explains that tutti unisono with which every newly coined solecism instantly chimes in spite of the general torpor and malaise. With their impudent corruptions these wage-laborers of language take revenge on our mother-tongue for boring them so incredibly. -Nietzsche
Now I don't necessarily agree with Nietzsche here, categorically, but his position is worth a look. After all, in a nation that has pretty much granted more respect and obeisance to youth in the forms of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, rather than to the wisdom and experience of age such as historians Daniel Boorstin or Plato the philosopher, a Nietzschean position is not hard to sympathize with.
There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a "change election," the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda. -
Whatever the cultural ramifications of this mode of thought and communication is, the one thing that is clear to me is how dangerous it is politically. A nation of people who believe that impulse and emotion is superior and better than thought and thoughtfulness is a nation who will, eventually, succumb to political tyranny. We need go no further than look at Hitler's position on propaganda, of which, he certainly was a master:
The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses' attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision.
All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be extended in this direction.
The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be. And this is the best proof of the soundness or unsoundness of a propaganda campaign, and not success pleasing a few scholars or young aesthetes.
The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses. The fact that our bright boys do not understand this merely shows how mentally lazy and conceited they are.
Once understood how necessary it is for propaganda in be adjusted to the broad mass, the following rule results:
It is a mistake to make propaganda many-sided, like scientific instruction, for instance.The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out.
Thus we see that propaganda must follow a simple line and correspondingly the basic tactics must be psychologically sound.
- Hitler, Mein Kampf
This is why many people, including democrats fear an Obama presidency. The amount of slavish faith in him is unparalleled. The videos of children singing his praises is scary to any parent. His relationship with domestic terrorists, organizations associated with voter fraud and racists leaders should be a cause for concern. In any case, while we can all choose to be good thinkers or bad thinkers, Social Networking sites such as Twitter encourage and proliferate such lazy and sloppy thinking and communication. There is an outright anger and hatred for anything that wishes to raise the conversation to a new level of discourse which demands personal reflection, research and the ability to listen. Not only that, such expression isn't even possible, since you have a 140 character limit.
Now I know that Twitter is not solely responsible for the evils of anything. Nothing is. My point is that it is one symptom of something very sick about our nation, just like the economic crisis is a symptom of something very sick as well.
It is always wise to be cautious.
I have an eight month old daughter. She will not be taught how to think in school. I know that. I will have to teach her myself and give her that classical education she deserves, not because I think I am superior or because I have disregard for others, but because her mind deserves to be exercised as much as her body, into something fit and agile, even at the cost of facing the anti-intellectualism whose only power is in its multitudinousness.
