A Long Road Back

Yesterday, I wrote in support of newspapers.  This morning, in the NY Times opinion section I got to read this rather long piece by Bret Stephens. Which actually hits many of the points that I have been mulling over in my head over the past week at least, maybe much longer than that. Stephens is one of the conservative voices that I have felt rather reflects the reason I used to identify as sort of center-right.  He values things like truth, and acknowledges that no ideology has the market cornered on truth.  That is not a relativist statement, it is an important acknowledgement of the reality that poets have noticed from Yeats to Bukowski.  Yeats says it this way: "the best lack conviction and the worst work with passionate intensity." Bukowski said it this way: "The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts and the stupid ones are full of confidence."
One of the most valuable things that I read about the recently departed evangelist Billy Graham was the story of how he overcame one of his darkest moments.  The moment is, of course, his association with Richard M. Nixon, and not just in sort of a generic support, but in a rather close relationship which included tape recorded conversations in which Graham seems to be on the same bigoted and paranoid train as Tricky Dick.  Graham did a hard thing in the wake of Watergate: he admitted he was wrong.  Not just about the relatively small act of bad behavior, but about his theological confusion of America for the Kingdom of God and his idolatrous infatuation with political power.  That is respectable, whatever else you might think about the Preacher, that sort of public repentance and ability to learn from a mistake is a good thing.
It is not a thing that is much on display in our public discourse about anything at the moment.  I will be the first to admit that nuance is a really annoying feature of the real world.  Decisions and arguments are much easier when things are simple, black and white options. Who wants to parse details when it comes to things like immigration, health care and gun regulations.  No one wants to think about moderate, incremental compromises on those things, everyone wants something done right now, and they want it done all the way.  Stephens points out in the above article that one of the big threats to the free press is the way that people seem to want to be in a permanent state of rage.  They don't want to see the other side of an issue because it distracts from their righteous indignation.
It is far too easy for me to totally write off the conservative side of the coin when I listen to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity (which is why I choose not to do that), they just make me angry with their smug pandering to an ideology I no longer agree with. I do watch Bill Maher, but with an awareness that he is doing the exact same thing, just in my preferred end of the cesspool. People like Mr. Stephens, and others like him, are becoming important to me, because I can't write them off, in fact, more often than not, I agree with them, not necessarily about everything, but about enough to keep reading.
This is an important piece of our way back from where we are now: to find middle ground, somewhere, on those issues that divide us.  Both left and right have their extremists, we need to stop listening to them. We cannot and should not try to silence them or shout them down, for in doing that we become the very enemy we seek to destroy. They have a first amendment right to spew their venom with as much confidence as they like, the intelligent people, with their doubts, must learn to tune out the wingnuts and find the people that might actually challenge their thinking.
Believe me, you will be a better thinker if you don't just tune into things you agree with.  I believe that Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death ought to be required reading for people today. Even though it was written in the mid 1980's it is a prophetic analysis of what was happening and has continued to happen as people moved away from the printed word as a primary means of communication and to the visual media of television. Our brains process written things differently than we do people talking, we think more carefully about what we hear and what we say in writing (twitter and facebook sometimes challenge this premise, but do not entirely negate it).  In a world of written things, ideas can be formulated, refined and debated.  In the world of TV, everything is a soundbite and attention to detail is not really wanted or much pursued. The internet seems to have some of the strengths and weaknesses of both visual and written media, and honestly it often seems to be like the worst of both worlds. Postman was prophetic in his description of how destructive this could be to our very civilization, and boy was he right.
But here we are, stuff is broken, that we can all agree upon.  We may disagree on how to fix it, or even on what stuff is broken and on how broken it is, but the one thing that I see on all sides among people with good sense is the acknowledgment that something is indeed wrong with our civilization.  That's pretty unsteady ground to stand upon, but it may be the only place we have to start the journey back.