When did burning down the house become the preferred solution for sorting out its various problems?
In the best of times persuading someone to do or believe something is difficult. And these are definitely not the best of times. One could be forgiven for assuming that self-destruction is not in our nature: that it doesn’t need to be proved or argued. But watch enough Youtube videos of people engaging in behaviors that can only end badly, or Britons willingly separating their nation from its European neighbors, or voters who seem comfortable channeling their free-floating anger into a political movement, and you begin to wonder. When did burning down the house become the preferred solution for sorting out its various problems?
A common theme on this site is that we are distracted and over-committed. It’s harder to be thoughtful when time and fatigue overtake solid values like risk avoidance and forbearance. The exasperation we all feel at times when incrementalism and caution seem too tepid sets us up to accept non-incremental change, even if adopting it means trashing rational impulses like fact-finding and circumspection. Both are tools for informed change that can seem too slow to deal with the wounds of class, ethnic resentments, or the sloppy machinery of self-government. They are easily vanquished by the incendiary language of a demagogue.
If we are lucky, this phase of seeking big change with little understanding is only one moment in a political cycle that will change. That’s the conventional wisdom. But a better case can be made that we are steadily moving toward a new kind of American politics where many in Congress and those seeking the presidency are motivated more by expressive opportunities than the actual work of governance. In the parlance of older members of the Senate, these folks are “show horses” rather than “work horses.” Even shutting down the government–a draconian step taken by Ted Cruz in 2013 to deny a vote for the Affordable Care Act–was done with more defiance than shame. Governing through compromise and cooperation seems to not be in their nature, leading to outcomes where the spotlight on the successful conciliators would have to be shared. By contrast, demagogues inclined to use bumper-sticker solutions that resonate with an angry electorate may know that their methods are at odds with the deliberative nature of their work, but they also know that throwing rhetorical grenades will mean that they can have the spotlight to themselves.
This is a pattern that great writers on American democracy like Walter Lippmann worried about. The public, he noted, can be dangerously out of step with national needs, converting trumped up fantasies into the urge to push for too much too soon, or too little too late. Such it was with the Communist witch-hunts of the 30s and 40s, or the current fashion for deprecating diplomacy in favor of the raw application of military power.
The questions that are white-hot right now are part of the same maelstrom: Should we block entry to the U.S. based on a visitor’s religious beliefs? Will it help us in the long-run to strong-arm China, which owns so much of American debt? Should we deport the mostly hard-working undocumented families woven into the American fabric? These are blunt proposals, better written into the third acts of revenge films than ginned up to be the policy positions of a great nation.
There’s a Tom Cheney cartoon in the New Yorker of a frustrated office worker standing over his computer with his desk chair in his raised arms. He’s ready to bring it crashing down on the non-functioning device, with its innocent screen command to “Strike any key to continue.” We know the feeling, and there are times when we would give anything for the shortcut a grand unilateral gesture. But the current preference for trashing caution will fill us with regrets later.
The vagaries of online news coverage and bad timing mean that it’s now possible for a private person to be the object of unrestrained global rage.
Because we live more of our lives online, and because it takes so little effort to magnify almost any event into its own moral drama, we are now awash in messages of unfiltered rage all over the internet. We accept that almost any combination of bad judgment and a video that documentsit can “go viral.” The vagaries of online news coverage and bad timing mean that it’s now possible for a private person to be despised and vilified around the world for making a bad decision. As with so many trending internet topics, a reasonable sense of proportionality is swept aside. Youtube consumers revel in videos of mostly nameless individuals captured at a moment of a serendipitous and sometimes cringe-inducing miscalculation. These “fails” are hard to ignore, feeding a primal need for the shock and awe stimulation of the unexpected. The smallest moments put us and millions of others in a loop we sometimes would have done well to have missed.
True, the idea of a local news event surfacing as a national obsession is not new. There are many accounts of stories even in the first half of the last century that became the preoccupation of American radio and newspaper consumers. Some of the best known were accounts of children who had fallen down wells or suddenly disappeared. Radio listeners tuned in by the hours to listen to breathless chronicles of rescuers trying to save Kathy Fiscus, who died before being reached in 1949. A happier conclusion with even more coverage occurred in Texas in 1987.
The difference with a viral story is that it is far easier to tap into the river of digital media originating from billions of internet users who contribute to the flow of potential viral content. Figure in the social variable of an event that arises from the apparent irresponsibility of one party, and the viral story takes on the outlines of a global morality play. The child-in-a-well stories today would probably focus equally on the neglectful homeowner who left lethal pieces of open ground in harm’s way.
We love the idea of culpability. It gives focus to some of our easily-stoked rage. And In some ways it’s become one of the least attractive features of our wired world.
This capability to link strangers who have viewed a single story into a community of outrage means that far too many of us are willing to save our energy to muster disgust for an event we do not fully understand involving individuals we do not know. As with our national political life, we seem to prefer pouring our free-floating anger into events over which we have no control, and with little more than indignation to offer.
We love the idea of culpability. It gives focus to some of our free floating rage. And In some ways it’s become one of the least attractive features of our wired world.
Such was the case with the deaths of two rare mammals well represented on YouTube: a gorilla in the Cincinnati Zoo and a well-known male lion in Zimbabwe. Both illustrate how low the flash point that will ignite cycles of hate can be. Cecil the lion and Harambe the gorilla were justifiably mourned after being shot by individuals: in the first case, by a Minnesota dentist with too much cash and too little common sense, as well as a pathetic need to bolster his ego by claiming another creature’s life. In the second instance, it was a parental miscue that resulted in a zoo official making shooting a gorilla to rescue a child who entered the primate’s domain.
World reaction to the dentist’s behavior forced him to close his practice and make himself scarce. Many of us took pleasure in his shame. The twist in the second instance was that the target was the mother, who momentarily took her eye off of her young son just long enough to miss his disappearance into the gorilla’s habitat. The woman received thousands of hate notes which found their way to her social media sites and e-mail, though authorities declined to call this anything more than an unfortunate accident. She probably behaved no differently than most parents with young children in constant motion.
This case is a reminder of the power of digital contagion completely swamps the logic of proportional reaction. Who knew that living in the global village would also mean being an involuntary witness to even the minor sins of other strangers? That clearly puts a lot of wear and tear on our psyches, especially if it means that we need to take on the alleged moral failings of even a tiny fraction of the estimated 3.2 billion wired inhabitants.
