I was tempted to write a list of the stupidest things I've read on blog comment threads about the Hobby Lobby ruling but so many stupid things have been said that it would be several hours of work to determine which is the stupidest. I wish people would read decisions AND THE DISSENTS TO IT before they figured they knew what was in it. But that's a bit like work and, heavens knows, we're not supposed to ask that people actually figure out what they're talking about before they put it out in the internet and other people who haven't found out what they're talking about start embroidering on the misinformation available. And that's from various "reality communities" "brain trusts" and the such.
But Tuesday is a really bad day for me to get any writing done and, frankly, dealing with the stupidity of the online clacks is getting to tell on me. I will make a resolution that I will announce at the end of July, but only if I keep it.
We need a new left that isn't hampered by idiots and bigots and suckers for the set up jobs that the corporate right sets for it. One that doesn't figure a lie is as good as the truth if it gets you attention, Lord knows the pseudo-left hasn't managed to get much more than a bit of attention for some of its more gaudy marginal figures. It's been that way pretty much for almost the past half century. I mark 1968 as a good one for the decline of the real left, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the idiocy of the left aiding and abetting the election of Nixon over the flawed but remarkably better Hubert Humphrey. A lot can be learned from looking at the SDS in that period as well, it is a microcosmic model of leftist failure, not least of which is due to the struggle for attention seekers to grab the mic and declare themselves to be the most radical in the room.
I had thought the internet was going to produce the conditions for the revival of the left but that doesn't look nearly as promising as it did a decade ago, you know, the year that Sam Harris wrote his ignorant, bigoted screed, The End of Faith. That's about when I noticed there were big problems with the online left. And, unlike who those on the internet believed him to be back then, Harris is no leftist. Neither was Christopher Hitchens and the leftism of Dawkins et al is hardly the left we need. It's all related and when you admit what you've seen it all makes sense, not the complete picture but the reasons that the left fails begins to cohere when you consider what the left would need to do to even be a left, and it's not what we've been doing.
It's clear to me the internet is not producing any enlightenment more than TV ever did. As I was telling my daughter the other day, the old newsreels that were filmed around the world and proclaimed themselves "The Voice of the Globe" had more impact on opening the world to Americans (at least) than anything that happened afterwards. I got Vietnam on my TeeVee every night on the news, and now I can read the Irish Times (I still remember the first time I did) on my computer, but am I any more a citizen of the world than I was?
ReplyDeleteNo.
We all seek out the company that confirms our preferences and reinforces our biases. There are sociological terms for this, a vocabulary that gives us a convenient shorthand to describe this phenomena that isn't a phenomena at all, but a perfectly predictable activity of human behavior. You can trace it through human history without the terms of sociology: tribalism; feudalism; monarchies; small towns v. big cities; nationalism; church v. state, church schism, the almost endless fracturing of Protestantism; and so on and so on and so on.
There is indeed nothing new under the sun, and the internet did not replace our natures with new and more divine ones. We're the same apes flinging poo we always were.