A Clear and Present Danger

Online political hyperbole and how not to be a sucker.

Look hard at the image above. See the spots?

That’s what the “Twitter wars” are: A pattern of illusions.

Part I: Preaching to the Choir

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Queensland in Australia, a story went around campus one week about the first-year medical students in the anatomy lab. Apparently someone removed a penis from one of the cadavers and it got tossed around the room. (No pun intended.)

(Maybe the penis just fell off the cadaver; if you’ve ever been in a human anatomy lab, you know those cadavers aren’t changed every week.)

Some degree of desensitization is actually necessary in training people to maintain their emotional equilibrium and perspective in professions which have to be able to cope with daily exposure to stressful spectacles like physical trauma and injury. But there are limits to how far desensitization can go in protecting us from stress; and that’s not the goal of those who employ it as a strategy.

In the years since the Vietnam war, campaign strategists have learned a lot about manipulating public opinion, including how to use desensitization and other tricks of mass media to hijack, not only the content and direction of a debate, but its tone. On Twitter for example, offensive comments and insults are now so normal from even highly-placed politicians on the right that the left often don’t notice when we’re engaging in the same behavior ourselves — that doesn’t mean, however, that we feel their insults any less keenly.

Tone is very important, because most of the time when we talk politics, we’re talking to other people who share the same values and beliefs. Promoting a practical, rational, conciliatory tone allows people to recognize that they have certain things in common with those on the other side of an issue; promoting an ideological, combative and divisive tone not only prevents an exploration of common ground, it reinforces the contempt for “others”, and the fear concealed by that contempt, which underlies the conservative world view.

I follow very few right-wingers on Twitter, and I’m followed by very few of them. “Trolls” as right wing advocates are referred to don’t actually surface very often in my stream. I like it that way, largely because whenever they do surface, the debate is toxic and unproductive, as online confrontations almost invariably are.

How then, can I have a reasonably accurate understanding of the American right wing’s pet issues and political platform, and the aggressive tone those issues are couched in?

I know because it’s endlessly repeated and reflected by the left.

Let’s call this The Number One Problem for Progressives. It deserves the title, for several reasons.

1. Repeating a right-wing ideologue’s principles in your own words has no place in rebuttal; it actually justifies and reinforces the ideology you’re trying to refute. It doesn’t matter how critical of the ideology you are. It doesn’t matter if you’re being ironic; in fact I suspect that the impulse to repeat the conservative platform in heavy ironic tones is one of the most damaging to the progressive cause, and I see a lot of it on Twitter. You can find hard evidence of this in The Debunking Handbook and in Denialism: What is it and how should we respond?, both of which discuss the very similar problem faced by scientists in refuting various science denialisms such as climate science denial and creationism. I’d like to go a bit further and suggest that even acknowledging an indefensible ideological position like the current brand of American conservative extremism is in a way (though unintentionally of course) defending it. Note that NewsCorps’ standard strategy against stories which are damaging to Rupert Murdoch’s interests is not to argue against them but to leave them out of the news altogether. When was the last time you read a story about the current phone-hacking court case against Murdoch in the U.K.? Have you even heard of the new book about Murdoch by a respected Australian media analyst?
   I’ll say more about how to respond to right wing advocacy without reinforcing it shortly; I’m not suggesting it’s easy, nor am I suggesting that we shouldn’t keep each other abreast of what the extremists are doing. However, it is definitely possible to do this without repeating or even referring to whatever conservative principle is involved.
2. Whenever we’re thinking and talking about something the right has said, it’s very tempting to buy into the destructive tone of debate dictated by right wing strategists (see also Part III). If we fall into that trap, we’re recycling the toxic atmosphere of insult, ridicule, threat and hyperbole that right wing media pumps out, and we alienate undecided voters who catch some of what we say. And we’re damaging our own resilience by capitulating to an aggressive and intolerant attitude toward others.
3. When our attention is on the right, we’re not thinking and talking about the humanist future we want to build together. (Almost certainly, if you think of yourself as being on the left, secular humanism is what you believe in; how much do you read about it?*) An obsession with right-wing extremism short-circuits our energy and our commitment to building a utilitarian humanist future. We may seem to lack confidence, when actually we should know very well that our plan is the better one for a large number of practical reasons, not based in ideology as right-wing principles almost always are. It causes us to stray from our faith in reason and inclusiveness. We become distracted, unfocused, reactive and vulnerable. We may even lose our sense of belonging, forget to be supportive of each other, and eventually, lose our will to go on.

This essential difference — practical utilitarianism — is the key to finding answers when you’re confronted with criticism from the right. Focus on practical planning for practical outcomes. If you feel you must be critical of what they’re saying, do it by pointing to the high costs of right-wing theory in practice. Figure out which right-wing principle they’re advocating if you can, but don’t repeat it back to them. And — the real trick — don’t be insulted by insults.

They’re the ones being deceived, not you. Their fear is the engine driving America’s political burnout; it’s fueled by the wealth and influence of their ideologues, not ours. In all other respects they’re actually just like us. Yes, sadly many of them are beyond help — and the best response to those is none at all.

Don’t give them the air time.

It may be easier said than done, but that is why they do what they do; and speaking for myself, it would certainly be much easier done if more of my online progressive colleagues caught on.

• *Secular humanism is really not supposed to be anti-religion, but in the United States its advocates have developed what I feel is an unnecessary and unhealthy anti-religion focus. Maybe this is because the need to “fight” for a belief against its perceived “enemies” is typically American. Honestly, it’s probably more useful to think of yourself as simply “humanist”, but being aware at the same time that there are important differences between religious and secular humanism. American secular humanism can also venture a little too close to right-wing libertarianism for my liking.
• *Just remember: The most important tenet of secular humanism is that the individual should reflect for themselves on any idea they’re presented with, and make their own choice about whether or not to accept it.
• *If you do some reading, you’ll notice the emphasis in secular humanism on “consequentialism” or “utilitarianism”. These are ethical terms for making choices according to which option can be expected to bring about the most useful results, as opposed to “deontology” which essentially means following rules. This doesn’t mean that secular humanists have no rules of behavior; in everyday practice, we all use a combination of these two methods of decision making. It means, rather, that secular humanists choose the rules we will follow, based on the most likely consequences of following them. Religious humanism, for example, accepts the rules that are stipulated in religious writings whereas secular humanism leaves this choice up to the individual.

Part II: It’s Not About “Being Nice”

If you think I’m trying to tell you to “be nice” you’re missing the point.

I’m telling you that the future of practical humanism will be advanced exponentially if we return ourselves to a state of mind where right wing extremism is simply beneath our notice.

Beneath our notice: That’s where ideas belong when they’re on the wrong side of history.

The bottom line is that the right has no ideas to offer that weren’t rejected in principle by western civilization hundreds of years ago.

If you’re not sure about this, read up a bit on the Enlightenment and then treat yourself to some John Stuart Mill. You’ll soon realize that there’s no need to doubt our position as humanists, or dignify the attempt to undermine it with a response; we should remember that every single day. We should never feel forced to defend it, because it has already been decided that this is where humanity’s future lies. (Why do you think the right-wing ideologue is in such a frenzy?)

It was decided by the French Revolution. It was decided by the fall of Tzarist Russia. It was decided by the crumbling of colonialism, including the American Revolution, and the world-wide rejection of slavery. It was decided by the flourishing of secular humanism after World War I, the defeat of European fascism in World War II, and the failure of the totalitarian regimes of the U.S.S.R. and Nazi Germany. All of these defunct institutions were built on the same principles as modern conservatism, and they died the natural death that will be their lot as well.

It was also decided categorically by the American people, when they elected Barack Obama as president for the second time.

It’s only a matter of time.

Once again, this isn’t easy to do in the current media climate; I understand that very well. We all know about the Murdoch and Koch empires in media and pseudo-science. They work on the principle of flooding the public debate with negativity, violent metaphors, paranoia, irrational selfishness, “word appropriation” and the smearing of individuals. They work on the post-modern, nihilistic principles that widespread repetition of a falsehood makes it indistinguishable from the truth, and that whoever controls the dialogue controls the debate (as they frequently tell each other).

They work on the principle of always keeping the left on the defensive.

Personally I don’t believe in neutral media — not in the present condition of the world, at least. And, as some of us realized when Martin Bashir was banished from MSNBC, it’s not necessarily easy to tell the difference between left- and right-influenced media outlets.

Some media outlets hijack both content and tone for the right. Some, however, give the content to the left (you might call it, throwing us a bone) while in the more important matter of tone, they work consistently for the right. Think about this carefully when you’re watching cable news. Think about the profitability aspect, as well. Think about the burning of your personal time and the monopolization of the space in your head. Whose issues are they, taking up that space? What is their tone doing to your effectiveness as an individual advocate? Are they bringing you together with other progressives in the real world?

And then consider the possibility of a clear road to freedom.

Part III: Violent Metaphors

You need to leave them behind.

As an Australian who has been saturated in American politics for a while now, the most striking feature of American political debate It’s the work of a moment to find an example in right-wing advocacy because the right-wing ideologue benefits enormously from it, but if I may ask you to keep it in mind in future, watch how often you find yourself using these words in a political context and reflect on how this tendency is damaging the progressive humanist cause:

There are many others — I left out “shot” for example. The point is to set yourself a goal: Don’t confuse military projects with rhetorical ones.

There are always alternatives.

Until the early 1980s (some of us remember that far back) it was accepted practice to use male pronouns to identify a hypothetical 3rd person in any narrative. And then, within the space of a few years, everybody just stopped doing it. Now and then I come across a stubborn patriarch who clings to it, but even right-wing writers now instinctively avoid it; we learned to substitute “they” and “them”, or use “she” sometimes when context demanded a singular.

This is the same thing. We can all do it; we’ve done it before.

Try challenging yourself to notice the metaphorical in your language, and then to imagine taking out the emotionally loaded terms. You may not find it easy at first, but if you can manage it you’ll probably find that altering the tone of what you say has a remarkable effect on your confidence and faith in the future.

An associated problem is the tendency to use antiquated terms applied to mental illness: Crazy, loony, retard, idiot, stupid, and I’ll leave it to you to discover the many others. It’s not helping, folks. Telling someone they’re stupid won’t endear you or your ideas, either to them or to anyone in ear-shot.

And online, that’s potentially quite a lot of people.

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I’m a science writer with an interest in politics and society. Find me @DispatchesUSA and feel free to submit to my collections on Medium.