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Saturday, October 30, 2010

Promoting False Equivalencies Is Not a Restoration of Sanity

As we head into a mid-term election that looks likely by most accounts to reward those who loudly proclaim their desire to do the opposite of what most people claim to want to be done, it is enormously important to grasp the reality and the significance of the reality that majorities appear to believe what is palpably the opposite of easily demonstrable facts of the matter concerning the rates at which they are being taxed, the public cost of the bank bailouts, the number of legislative accomplishments of this congress compared to others, while at once they seem indifferent to the declared hostility of so many soon-to-be-elected Republicans to elementary facts of climate science, Keynesian economics, American history, Constitutional law, harm-reduction models of public policy, and on and on and on.

Contra Jon Stewart, that speaking truth to power is often unmannerly is not what is making America insane at the moment, but that the media has grown indifferent or hostile to the wholesome force of the factual. And I cannot believe it falls to an effete elite aesthete, a menacingly relativistic humanities scholar, a convivial let a bazillion flowers bloom multiculturalist, to make this point -- namely, that however defeasible and contingent they always remain in principle, candidate descriptions for belief in matters of prediction and control (beliefs especially relevant to the administration of public goods after all) warranted by consensus according to the criteria of public testability and substantiation, among others, are indeed preferable to those that are not so warranted.

Declaring MSNBC (like it or not) the equivalent of Fox "News" -- as Stewart's rally seemed to do -- is profoundly disrespectful of fact, and to declare those who decry a non-existing "gay agenda" equivalent to those who decry actually existing institutional racism in America -- as, again, Stewart's rally seemed to do -- is profoundly disrespectful of both decency and fact, and to demand such disrespect -- as the rally seemed to do -- is not to champion a restoration of sanity but to indulge in delusion.

While it is surely true, as the enormously well-meaning, likable, and usually funny Jon Stewart said today, that not every self-identified Tea Party activist is a racist it is also true that without white racism the Tea Party would not be the force it has become in our debased public discourse, that the Tea Party depends on racism to drive its disparate energies -- and to disdain this truth is not a restoration of sanity but, again, to indulge in delusion.

Maintaining the insanity of false equivalencies is not a path toward the restoration (or, to be blunt, initial accomplishment) of sanity and fairness in America. Given that Stewart insists his is a critique of the media's coverage of politics rather than politics itself, it is rather depressing to find him re-enacting the phony "centrism" and false objectivity of factually-indifferent "balance" that has typified mainstream media debasement of sense for so long as his solution to this debasement. Until Jon Stewart takes a stand for the factual -- which requires courage precisely because one always risks being wrong in one's stand and paying at the least the price of correction -- he is, I'm afraid, part of the problem he rightly decries and not its solution.

There are both earnest and ironic ways of telling truths, including telling truth to power -- but phony balancing acts between con-artists and public servants, or between ignoramuses and experts, as well as recourse to cheap sarcasm all lack the courage of conviction and debase sense.

Also, when all is said and done, it's not funny, at least not for long.

And by way of conclusion I do have to note that I personally thought the only real laugh-out-loud comedy at what was essentially a Comedy Central promotional event was in the great signs and costumes in the crowd, not from the rather stale professional bits on stage.

3 comments:

jimf said...

> [M]ajorities appear to believe what is palpably the
> opposite of easily demonstrable facts of the matter
> concerning the rates at which they are being taxed,
> the public cost of the bank bailouts, the number of
> legislative accomplishments of this congress compared
> to others, while at once they seem indifferent to the
> declared hostility of so many soon-to-be-elected
> Republicans to elementary facts of climate science,
> Keynesian economics, American history, Constitutional law,
> harm-reduction models of public policy. . .

So what the hell **is** the matter with Kansas?

http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-America/dp/0805073396

Is it our fault, Toto?

Dale Carrico said...

The left complains and the right lies pretty much equally ferociously whatever the facts are, and yet people don't spontaneously respect facts? Unpossible! Inconceivable!

jimf said...

> The left complains and the right lies. . .

How to Make Friends and Manipulate Irrational Voters (George Lakoff)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCXxc_M9EmE