The other day my wife was talking about a friend who posts on Facebook a constant stream of simple-minded political remarks, much of it simply asserting the other side to be very bad people. "She's a great person," I said–which she is–"but you just have to accept that when it comes to politics she's crazy, and deal with her on that basis."
Having said that, I started thinking about the number of people I know to whom this applies. Really, and sadly, it's most of the people who have very strong political convictions, and these days it seems that most people do. There are some you can have a conversation with, but so many of them can only throw at you the sound bites and strawmen that are current with whichever side they're on. If you don't agree with them–and I generally disagree to at least some extent with all of them–you can either get into an unpleasant and frustrating argument, or try to change the subject, or simply make your getaway, whether that means backing out of an online discussion or a physical escape at a social event.
Has it always been this way? I think the counsel against discussing religion and politics in social settings has been around for a long time. And it certainly isn't a brand-new thing, because Walker Percy satirized it in Love in the Ruins. That was written at the end of the '60s, and I think the syndrome had gotten considerably worse over the preceding five or six years, with the polarization of the old more-or-less conservative middle-class culture and the new cultural leftism: the conflict became then not just a difference of views about specific issues but a deep disagreement about fundamentals–a religious division, for all practical purposes.
Someone or other has called our present environment a culture of outrage. And outrage is certainly what you get with the crazy folks, the ones you really shouldn't talk politics with. Face to face, they almost seem to swell up, and their voices rise and get that barking or baying tone.
The Internet has made it worse, if only by bringing people into more frequent contact, and by allowing them to get indignant without the inhibiting effect of personal contact. I claim credit for seeing this before the web existed, when the Internet was only Usenet, a much more limited and limiting environment. I described it in a piece for Caelum et Terra called "Global Metropolis." The culture we were developing, I said, using Usenet as a harbinger, was looking less like a village, where everybody knows everybody else, than like a big city, where people congregate in great numbers at close proximity but remain strangers, frequently hostile strangers.
I guess we've always had, for instance, the cranky family member of whom everybody says "Don't get him started" on some subject or other. But it's begining to feel like we're becoming a nation of fanatical aunts and uncles whom one really shouldn't get started. I'm trying not to be one of them. But don't get me started.
Light On Dark Water 
Leave a comment