A singular explanation that casts an entire community as unified by a secret intention explains the temptations of costly mental shortcuts.
The stories we tell ourselves can be breathtaking in their credulity. Who could respond otherwise to an account by an old John Bircher that would have us believe a member of the Senate died because the Soviets planted radium in his chair;1 or that cartoon animators were collaborating to turn Daffy Duck into a shill for communist propaganda;2 or that Princess Diana was intentionally rubbed out by the royal family,3 or that there are about 80 “Communists” in the current House of Representatives?4 or that the Ku Klux Klan is “a leftist group.”5 Singular explanations that cast entire communities in the same mold are a reminder that we articulate what we need more than what we know.
On their face, characterizations of motives are always implausible. Groups of humans are never of one mind. That usually applies to individuals as well. Anyone who has worked in a multi-layered organization or tried to get definitive answers from others probably carries some of the shrapnel thrown off from their fractured responses.6 To be sure, humans are social animals. But it doesn’t follow that they behave with the uniformity that the grammar of our descriptions implies. We are simply not well suited to think or act in complete concordance with others. The need to define the boundaries of our own worlds is strong, and a language of simple pronouns propels us into delusions of uniformity. Our thinking is enabled by the descriptive uniformity made possible by the language of “them.” Add in the trio of “us,” “we” and “they” and we have the core terms that can map the boundaries of alien territory.
On those occasions when groups seem to be functioning as one, we are willing to pay handsomely to watch it happen: at a football game, attending a performance by a great orchestra, or perhaps watching a play, where what the writer and actors intended more or less unfolds as planned. The attractions of perfect coordination are undeniable. Synchronicity creates the impression of coherence. And from the illusion of coherence we look for shared intentionality.
The more enlightened assumption is surely to expect natural divergence. Descriptions of behavior have more credibility when they are understood in their uniqueness and variability There is even something pleasing when unimpeachable fact sabotages the smothering weight of a glib assertion. Good histories often provide this function: for example, when reminders of the impressive civil rights legacy of Lyndon Johnson defeat the instinct to place him in a rogue’s gallery of regressive Southern “pols,”7 or when we discover that Hollywood was largely invented by Eastern European Jews who were determined not to proselytize for their faith, but to create fantasies of middle-American normalcy.8 Unassailable details like these have a way of wringing out the excesses of condensed and fantasized narratives.
The justifiable caution against defining others in categorical terms is nothing less than an offense to our human nature.
Even so, the well-grounded caution against defining others in categorical terms is nothing less than an offense to our human nature. Talk gains force from categorical certainty. Against the realist’s impulse for shunning overstatements there is the even stronger compulsion to find glib generalization that will add urgency to our arguments. Aggregating “their” presumed motives tantalizes us with the kind of intelligibility that allows making sense of factions that matter, including those from whom we want to stand apart. It’s our nature to enter the fray of ordinary conversation ignoring caveats about what a gloss of simplified characterization will miss.
Interestingly, we are always willing to describe the diverse sources of action that are factors in our own biographies. We cherish our individuality and implicitly ask those around us to acknowledge it. But our search for universals that can be applied to others is unquenchable.
All of this takes on more urgency in an election year, when the compression of candidate’s comments in our news media encourages what amounts to speaking in gross overgeneralizations. This is what concerns the conservative Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, who recently scoffed at Donald Trump’s insinuation that “President Obama might be a secret jihadist.” In addition, he went on, Trump has raised the possibility
that Ted Cruz’s father might be implicated in the assassination of JFK; that Hillary Clinton might have been involved in the death of Vince Foster; that a federal judge, presiding over a case against Trump University, should be disqualified by his ethnicity.9
Arguments and evidence tend to vanish from this kind of rhetoric, replaced only by highly inaccurate characterizations of groups and individuals reduced to single markers like age, gender, their own religious traditions, political affiliations, and their home regions. We usually know this faulty logic when we take the time to assess it. Even so, it’s always tempting to imagine uniform intentions, using them as shortcuts through a thicket of real-world complexity.
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Adapted and updated from Gary C. Woodward, The Rhetoric of Intention in Human Affairs (Lexington Books, 2014).
Steven Goldzwig, “Conspiracy Rhetoric at the Dawn of the New Millennium: A Response,” Western Journal of Communication, Fall, 2002, 492.
Karl Cohen, “Toontown’s Reds: HUAC’s Investigation of Alleged Communists in the Animation Industry,” Film History, June, 1993, Ebsco Communication and Mass media Complete, accessed April 17, 2012. Nicholas Witchell, “Fayed Conspiracy Claim Collapses,” BBC News, April 7, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7326311.stm, accessed April 2, 2012.
Jeffrey Lord on CNN, quoted in Salon, June 10, 2016, http://www.salon.com/2016/06/10/good_lord_what_a_fiasco_cnns_shameless_trump_surrogate_is_poisoning_our_national_discourse_partner/
For Franklin Roosevelt, the villains were the Departments of the Treasury, State, and the Navy. To “change anything” was nearly impossible, he noted. See Emmet John Hughes, The Living Presidency (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1972), 184.
Robert Caro, “The Compassion of Lyndon Johnson,” The New Yorker, April 1, 2002, 56-77.
Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own (New York: Crown, 1988).
Michael Gerson, “A Delegate Revolt has Become the Republicans only Option,” Washington Post, June 21, 2016.
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.
