The art of debate, vital to democracy and culture alike, has largely disappeared. It’s still breathing, of course, in certain quarters like academia, jurisprudence and science. Still, not only is the empirical method currently considered by many Americans to be suspect at best, heretical at worst, but knowledge and employment of rhetoric seems to have vanished almost entirely from our national conversation.
When I started blogging as The Ten Gallon Liberal almost exactly three years ago, I said this: “It’s become clear that the mundane minutiae of the political process—stuff that requires an understanding of parliamentary procedure, about as exciting as reading the manual for a two-slice toaster—are being exploited by a bunch of Machiavellian nimrods in search of all sorts of undemocratic pleasures. We have to engage these people on the battlefield of political pettiness until they’ve moved on, but I long for the day when the political world will return to its former status as background hum.”
Little did I realize that engagement as an online reader and writer would reveal to me the daunting truth that the political world can’t return to background hum, not when debate has become so thoroughly unbound by the constraints of logic and reason. Poorly hewn arguments are not new, of course; the past was hardly some idyllic land where berobed acolytes protected the flame of reason.
But the Internet has become a forum for misfiring debaters like no other before it, and has played no small part in creating a climate in which having an opinion is mistaken for having an argument. Visit the comment sections of most political websites or blogs (including The Ten Gallon Liberal), and you’ll get a dizzying swirl of nonsense, cajoling, emotional uproar and entrenching of belief. Now and then, a well-constructed argument even rears its head. Now the offline version of America seems to have followed suit, in yet more dramatic fashion, thanks in part to all that extra practice.
In the Coen Brothers’ exceptional monument to the addle-headed, The Big Lebowski, “The Dude” (Jeff Bridges) gets embroiled in a kidnapping/extortion scheme. In one scene, he runs into a private eye who’s been following him. The private eye says, “Let me tell you something: I dig your work. Playing one side against the other—in bed with everybody—fabulous stuff, man.”
That position of meta-power is a tough one to come by. My immersion in the blogosphere has starkly reinforced my views about who holds that position in America. It’s not the frustrated progressives or angry tea partiers throwing so many virtual Molotov cocktails.
The true holders of power in Washington, the permanent players who remain no matter which party holds sway, are the best-funded corporations, the ones whose minions have the ears of legislators in a manner mere citizens cannot. The busier we are arguing in unhinged fashion over illusory political power, the freer they are to steer Washington toward winds favorable to their singleminded and unbenevolent ends. They march on with whoever can do them a favor at the moment.
It’s obvious in some ways—of course organizations with massive amounts of money gain more money by manipulating everything in their favor, and of course they do it all the time, no matter the cost to anyone else. It’s simply the nature of the beast we created by granting corporations the legal status of people. And what works dramatically in their favor is that so few people believe they have been or even can be persuaded by corporate manipulation, even though America has become the most PR- and advertising-drenched nation on the planet.
These realizations send me back toward the only thing that offers a different way to give voice to outcroppings of frustration in a world full of so much sound and fury: the more useless political engagement becomes, the gladder I am to be an artist. Art in the broad sense—music, writing, visual and performing arts of every stripe—still offers a way to be heard rather than entangled, a way to carry on a conversation of a higher and maybe even more productive sort.
It’s important to work toward the restoration of reason, no matter how impossible that battle seems. But it’s comforting to know that other kinds of voices and other kinds of expression haven’t gone down the drain. That’s especially important in an age so full of static, and a fine thing to ponder as another year slouches to an end.