Against The Calls For Dialogue
There’s no point if we’re not even speaking the same language
It is sad, this Fourth of July, to reflect on how thoroughly Americans are trapped, stuck babbling about their various idealized pasts and doomsday futures. They hardly know how to talk about what they say they want, let alone how to work toward it. Yet they keep talking about the need to come together and find common ground and work toward a better future where we don’t all hate each other. I wonder how Americans can achieve this.
Because what I’m saying is that the US might not ever do it.
As people on the blabosphere note every day, we are not talking.
Or, more accurately: conversations have become exercises in onanistic validation. The networks they travel in are limited by the human tendency for confirmation bias, a flaw too strong to overcome, it seems. Digital capitalism has remorselessly exploited isolated demographic target markets via identity politics, mass loneliness, and social media — and force-feeds market strata information and advertisements fabricated to spur predictably profit-generating action. So it’s really not so much a design flaw really.
Which raises the question: for all the indignation over reality bubbles, why would the process ever be reversed willingly by the ones engineering it — namely every company raking in profits on the web? The ease with which ads, the connective tissue of the present consumer economy, may be targeted on Google, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Amazon, Tumblr, etc., is far more valuable to the compacts and monopolies that control our national conversations than a functional social conversation would ever be, at least in the short-term.
So while the national conversation may be dysfunctional, it’s making some people very rich and very powerful. Barring a massive, consumer-led boycott or action, that’s not going to change. And what do you think the chances of that really are?
Conversation takes practice. Socializing is hard work. The fragmenting of American-ness to the benefit of media companies, search engines, marketers, etc. has led to the unlearning of what it means to take part in a conversation, whether it’s one-on-one or on a societal level. Contrary to optimistic claims about the need to embrace certain truths (some of these claims on this website), functional conversation relies on a foundation of common reality, and common reality demands a shared language.
Instead, American English is splintering into many pidgins reflecting the many sets of alternative realities and axioms available to lonely, community-impoverished Americans of all ages and political persuasions in the marketplace of ideological posturing.
Trumpians lament the naive cucks and scheming globalists that foil their attempts to MAGA hard. Silicon Valley types look to disrupt their fellow thought leaders in cottage microindustries via constructed authenticity and mindfulness. Progressives demand single-payer from the wealthy elites that rule the 99 percent with their oppression and neoliberalism. Moderates want to coexist and come together to move us forward as a whole into a bright future where opportunity, education, and respectability reign.
These ideologies all have their respective symbologies honed in the meme economy. On one extreme: guns, camo, paradoxically the American and Confederate battle flags, crucifixes, Call of Duty, skulls, baroque tattoos, trucknuts . . . On the other: Shepard Fairey posters, stylishly minimalist tattoos and piercings, LGBTQ rainbow flags, clever placards, abnormally dyed hair, designer hoodies, Starbucks mugs, pussy hats, stencils of clenched fists . . .
The words are mutually comprehensible insofar as there are dictionary definitions, but the real meaning is only understood from the outside looking in as caricature. Each clique develops its hyper-specialized social norms, its own language, such that interactions between them are hampered by the inability or lazy unwillingness to translate what the symbols mean to the ones dealing in them rather than what they mean to the ones trying to do the deciphering.
So why wouldn’t this process stop? It allows for consistency, and consistency is good for business and easy for the political neophyte.
Thus debates become little more than ritual repetitions of each side’s key talking points as agreed upon in their respective subreddits. The battles proceed predictably, the sides each believing they’ve won through superb use of their varied and well-formatted catchphrases. It’s Powerpoint as knowledge and inquiry. Or, if you’re in marketing, a deck as knowledge and inquiry.
Don’t start with what America really is. It is what it is what it is.
The future described in rapturous paeans to the beauty of a true liberal/progressive/ moderate/conservative/white/diverse America after having shed its mottled skin are about as likely to happen as the actual Rapture.
These sorts of ubiquitous thought experiments do little more than ignore the present quagmire and fast-forward to when it’s been magically and satisfactorily resolved. Whatever their value in guiding us into the future, these oracular pronouncements deprive us of the responsibility of mending the society that we compose while profiting off our desire to bask in a luxurious thought-future. Our insatiable anxieties fuel ad revenue.
Impotent calls for unity and dialogue are not how a nation fixes itself. They are, on the other hand, how a nation pretends it is already on the path to recovery without really thinking about what that recovery might entail. They also operate under the false assumption that all sides are worth inviting to the party at the end of the journey.
The fixing of American discourse wouldn’t look like any end we’ve seen prior, since never before in history has there been such a simultaneous density of general ignorance mixed with assuredness, global economic centrality, and raw destructive power as in the United States of America at this moment. In other words, we’ve never been wronger or stronger.
And the incentives necessary for that to change aren’t keenly enough felt by most people, not really — and, perhaps, they can’t be. At the end of the day, there is one unifying commonality that the major ideologies more or less share: America will carry on in some form more or less in line with our norms and the Constitution.
But perhaps the first step is admitting this: Failure is always an option. The US is no exception.
Nicholas Morley is based in Burlington, VT.
