By David Simmons
In the good old days when people used to talk to one another and debate intelligently, instead of “tweeting”, the Shakespearean term “hoist with your own petard” still meant something (even though nobody actually knew what a “petard” was).
Recently I watched an episode of Larry King’s Politicking program on RT on which he interviewed American lawyer Robert O’Brien, who was an “alternate representative” to the United Nations General Assembly under US president George W Bush. Honest to God, this guy makes Nikki Haley look like an intellect.
King could have saved some airtime by giving O’Brien a miss and simply providing a link to the “Neocon Talking Points Handbook”. About the only semi-original thought revealed by O’Brien was that Donald Trump’s September 19 address to the General Assembly was “hard-hitting” because it “named and shamed the bad guys” – that is, those who don’t toe the line of Saudi hegemony in the Middle East, those who don’t see Israel’s persecution of Gaza as particularly wondrous, those who don’t think the US rather than China should be dominant in the South China Sea and, of course, “socialists”.
One of the first thoughts I had while listening to O’Brien’s drivel that he was hoist with his own petard – smiling throughout, he seemed sincerely unaware of what a fool he was making of himself. But that was a rash judgment on my part. For no one ever “makes a fool of himself”: People are made fools of by others capable of thinking for themselves, shunning groupthink, listening to the views of intelligent people who differ from theirs, mounting a coherent defence of their own opinions, willing to admit it when they’re wrong, and possessed of a sense of humour that goes beyond insults and clever “memes” on Facebook.
People like that are becoming as rare as the Bornean orang-utan. And, unfortunately, not just on the right.
There are many reasons for the dumbing-down of the English-speaking world. As a longtime professional journalist, I’d argue that the steep decline in quality reporting and intelligent analysis, especially on television but increasingly in newspapers as well, is one of the main causes. To cite just one recent example, reports about the height of Melania Trump’s heels during her husband’s visit to hurricane-stricken Texas easily outnumbered interviews of scientists explaining the links between man-made climate change and the rapid worsening of tropical storms.
But there are many other factors. In all of the major English-speaking countries, access to higher education has become much more difficult over the past thirty years – more than a generation – and even when it is accessible, it has become far more difficult to justify spending huge amounts of money toward a degree in the social sciences, let alone the arts. If there is not a reasonable chance of your diploma getting you a job lucrative enough to start paying down that mountain of student debt, it’s off the table. So now what passes for education, except for the very wealthy, is strictly vocational, with little room for intellectual pursuit and independent thought. This is a fundamental change that has taken place within my lifetime.
As is so often the case, technology too has proved a mixed blessing. I currently work for Asia Times, a website that invites commentary from people of all walks of life all over the world. While editing their contributions, it is startling how often one comes across blatant plagiarism. Before the Internet, plagiarists had to do a bit of actual work, physically and deliberately transcribing stolen thoughts into their own writings, and the smarter ones would change some words here and there to cover up their theft. Now, it’s a simple matter of copying and pasting digital data. They don’t even have to read it.
However, people like that are not the norm on Asia Times – not yet, anyway. The site invites a much broader range of views than normally found in mainstream media, and hardly a day goes by when its readers – and, probably more so, we editors – can’t learn something new. But because of the site’s openness, brainless O’Brien types are allowed to share the podium with shining intellects.
One fairly frequent op-ed contributor is a mouth-foaming denizen of the US far religious right who, if an original thought ever did worm its way into his brain, he would probably write it off as a socialist conspiracy or demonic possession. I edit out most of his bigotry and, far from being offended, he has expressed appreciation for being given a voice on a media outlet that enjoys a reputation for credibility.
Recently we ran a piece of his almost completely as he had filed it, with very few cuts. My feeling at the time was very much like my reaction to the Robert O’Brien interview on Larry King’s show. Surely anyone who took the time to read the piece would be startled not by its opinions but by its veneer-thin shallowness: another neocon warmonger hoist by his own petard.
Maybe so, but this could be a bad example. The guy in question isn’t just shallow, he’s simply not a very good writer. Lefties who never leave the choir being preached to by fellow lefties, by organizations like The Young Turks who make a living off of mocking Republicans, neocons and the religious right, can be deluded into thinking all conservatives are idiots. Or, they might think that if there are some conservatives capable of forming full sentences, they only do so to twist the truth and gull the gullible, such as Canada’s Fraser Institute.
They are wrong. Nowadays the word “conservative” is very often misused to refer to reactionaries or libertarian extremists. The word more properly refers to a person who believes that even if conditions are not perfect, they could be made much worse by messing with them – especially with overly generous social programs that threaten the state’s ability to afford national security, higher wages that could aggravate unemployment, labour laws that hold back productivity or give too much protection to incompetent workers, and so forth. They want a just society as sincerely as “progressives” do; but they favour a slower, more cautious methodology. And I suspect there are a lot more of these real conservatives than the racists, science deniers and other bottom-feeding dunderheads who get the headlines.
Certainly, that is the case among Asia Times’ roster of writers.
And so, once again the progressive cause faces a dilemma. Freedom of speech is fundamental to that cause, yet petards that have become damp squibs, debate that has been dumbed down to 140 characters, the economic destruction of liberal education, and the concentration of what cleverness remains in the hands of conservatives and technocrats conspire against radical change toward a world free of poverty and war, and ruled by justice and tolerance.
