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HOW TO BELIEVE SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST
This entry was posted on 4/29/2010 9:19 AM and is filed under uncategorized.
Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't
believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When
I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes
I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
(Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 5)
from the website: "Lenny's
Alice in Wonderland Quotes":
Recently, a series of back-and-forths I had with conservative friends
and family in various forums, either e-mail or social network comment
sections, left me profoundly depressed, and not just depressed, but
positively mystified, because each "debate," if that is what you want to
call it, for lack of a better word, followed the same, eerie pattern:
First, they would accuse me of being a "far-left liberal," and all that
entailed, right off the bat, hand's down, whether they knew me well or
not. If they were family--and some were--they knew full well that I
voted as a registered Independent for many years and had, in fact, cast
votes for Ronald Reagan (twice) and George H.W. Bush (once), and that I
was from a military family whose son had fought in a war (twice) and who
supported the president's Afghanistan policy--NONE of which endears me
WITH the "far-left liberal" community.
None of that mattered.
I was still "far-left liberal."
Second, they would accuse me of being "close-minded" and "unwilling to
consider other viewpoints."
Why?
Well, because I wouldn't watch Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck.
Again, and again. And again. AND AGAIN I listed for them eight or ten
CONSERVATIVE news columnists that I read DAILY, from George Will to
David Brooks to Kathleen Parker to Russ Douthat to Peggy Noonan to
Michael Gerson and on and on--but it was as if there was some kind of
psychic BLANK SPACE in that portion of the comment or the e-mail.
They would come back and say things like, "You should watch Glenn Beck
because he really makes sense."
And I'd say, "So did John Nash, the brilliant mathematician who was
portrayed in the movie, "A Beautiful Mind,"--to whom Glenn Beck
has compared himself, I might add--and who, we all know, was CRAZY."
I'd mention, again, the conservatives I read--even throw in somebody
like Charles Krauthammer just to see what they'd say.
Nothing.
Back to, "You're close-minded because you won't consider other
viewpoints than the far-left news shows you watch."
So, I'd seize on that, and I'd say, "I don't WATCH news programming. I
don't watch Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews,
either!" (at least, not very often) "I READ! I read the New York
Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal,
the L.A. Times, the London Financial Times, the U.K.
Guardian--Jesus! It's not like I read the New York Times,
which I know you consider liberal, and then run over to Daily Kos to get
my opinion validated and then steam off and spew out an angry blog!"
Then they would get mad and say, "Oh well, I guess you think I'm STUPID
because I don't read all the stuff YOU read, just because I don't have
TIME..."
And I'd say, "Not at all. All I'm saying is BRANCH OUT and not trust
just ONE NEWS SOURCE because you are only getting ONE SLANT to your
news!"
And they would insist that FOX news was "fair and balanced," not like
the "far-left liberal news" that they were certain I was watching.
These arguments were so one-sided and impossible that I started to feel
like Alice through the Looking Glass--I could not reply or respond to
them.
In one instance, a family member sent a viral e-mail showing a
photograph of the president and first lady holding their LEFT hands over
their chests as some sort of subversive salute to the flag ON THE WHITE
HOUSE LAWN and demanded I explain THAT by God.
Of course, Snopes.com did so immediately, showing that the photo had
been photo-shop "flipped," and that the Marine in the background was wearing his
uniform ribbons on the wrong side of his chest, as proof.
STILL, they were suspicious of Snopes.com! They kept pushing and
pushing, until I just started to delete the e-mails altogether because
you cannot reason with this kind of psychic blindness, and I was really
starting to despair...
Until I heard about "EPISTEMIC CLOSURE."
It was originally defined by Julian Sanchez back in March in a brilliant
blogpost: "Frum,
Cocktail Parties, and the Threat of Doubt":
"One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative
movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic
closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and
cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of
course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed
out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore
ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well,
they disagree with the conservative media!)"
Now, to be perfectly clear on what Sanchez meant, I actually looked up
the word "epistemic" in my handy online dictionary. It is from the
Greek, and means:
"of or pertaining to knowledge or the conditions for acquiring it"
Ah-HA.
(Back in my hard-core feminism days, this would be what Gloria Steinem
would refer to as a "click!" moment.)
But Sanchez doesn't just point out the danger of closing the loop on
knowledge to a limited, approved number of sources--he goes on to point
out how "apostates"--those insiders who dare to criticize either one of
those sources or one of the approved conclusions therein--get shunned
and kicked out of the inner circle, attacked, diminished in stature, so
that they are no longer on the "approved" list of sources and therefore,
no longer to be included in the approved loop, which has just gotten
smaller:
"Think of the complete panic China’s rulers feel about any breaks in
their Internet firewall: The more successfully external sources of
information have been excluded to date, the more unpredictable the
effects of a breach become. Internal criticism is then especially
problematic, because it threatens the hermetic seal. It’s not just that
any particular criticism might have to be taken seriously coming from a
fellow conservative. Rather, it’s that anything that breaks down the
tacit equivalence between “critic of conservatives and “wicked liberal
smear artist” undermines the effectiveness of the entire information
filter. If disagreement is not in itself evidence of malign intent or
moral degeneracy, people start feeling an obligation to engage it
sincerely—maybe even when it comes from the New York Times. And there is
nothing more potentially fatal to the momentum of an insurgency fueled
by anger than a conversation. A more intellectually secure conservatism
would welcome this, because it wouldn’t need to define itself primarily
in terms of its rejection of an alien enemy."
Ahhhh...
Sanchez is not only getting closer, but he hit the nail on the head,
according to one of the more famous of those "apostates," David Frum,
who dared speak out and criticize the company line and was summarily
told "OFF WITH HIS HEAD!"
He, quite literally, did travel to China on business, and upon his
return to the United States, had this wry observation to make, in his
blogpost, "Groupthink
at the National Review" (which we all know, fired him over one
uncomfortable position he took with which they disagreed):
"How wonderful to return to a free country, I thought as I stepped off
the plane from Beijing at Washington Dulles. No more censorship, no
more official lies, no more kowtowing to high officials who gained power
by their mindless repetition of party dogma…
"Then alas I opened my browser and read the dump-on-Manzi comments on
NRO’s The Corner. Manzi had deviated from the One Correct Way of Mark
Levin Thought, and all his former colleagues had been summoned together
to Denounce and Struggle Against Him.
"Not one stood up to be counted in Manzi’s defense, not even
colleagues whom Manzi might have had reason to regard as close personal
friends...
"What makes this episode all the more remarkable is that Manzi is
actually a member of NR’s board of trustees – i.e., somebody who might
claim a little more scope to speak his mind. But even for trustees,
there are limits, and Manzi crossed them"
I dunno what-all was going on here, but I gather a National Review
trustee dared to contradict a popular but particularly boneheaded
entertainment right-wing talk-radio host on global warming.
"OFF WITH HIS HEAD!"
And he's not the only one.
Soon after David Frum's head rolled, Bruce Bartlett posted a blog, "David
Frum and the Closing of the Conservative Mind," in which he
detailed not only his own head-chopping experience but a very real
example of epistemic closure in the conservative loop:
"As some readers of this blog may know, I was fired by a right wing
think tank called the National Center for Policy Analysis in 2005 for
writing a book critical of George W. Bush's policies, especially his
support for Medicare Part D. In the years since, I have lost a great
many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, DC.
"Now
the same thing has happened to David Frum, who has been fired by the
American Enterprise Institute... Since,
he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly
something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had
noticed any comments by AEI "scholars" on the subject of health care
reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not
to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama
was trying to do.
"It saddened me to hear this. I have always hoped
that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first
to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is
being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will
slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn't already."
Yeah, I believe I'd say to the good Mr. Bartlett: Too late.
In response to Julian Sanchez's original piece on epistemic closure,
Jonathan Chait wrote a response in The New Republic, "The
Right and Epistemic Closure," in which he faces conservative
arguments that liberals do much the same thing when they get their news
from Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo and MSNBC and Rachel Maddow
or Jon Stewart, but adds a cogent and necessary point:
"The difference is that liberals do not see these outlets as replacements
for the news. In the conservative worldview, mainstream media is not
just flawed but fatally tainted by deep ideological hostility. Millions
of conservatives believe the only sources of credible news are
Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the like -- even a figure like Clarence
Thomas once told an interviewer that his sole sources of news are
Limbaugh and the American Spectator. Liberals may seek out ideologically
friendly sources to augment their information intake, but the
phenomenon of total epistemic closure that Sanchez describes is almost
entirely limited to the right."
THIS, then goes right at the heart of the arguments I was having with
right-wing family and friends, and why I thought I was talking to
them--metaphorically--face to face, only to find, when I reached out,
that my hand was smashing into a plate-glass window. They were not
hearing me. To them, ALL NEWS EVERYWHERE FROM ANY SOURCE was
suspect--one 80-year old family member even commented that my college
education amounted to "liberal propaganda"--and ONLY Fox news, and to
some, those maddening viral e-mails sent to them by fellow
right-wingers, could be trusted as accurate.
Sanchez's column provoked a storm of to-be-expected defensiveness from
the right, and the arguments were tiresome and predictable, falling
pretty much into the: LEFT-WINGERS DO IT TOO NYAH-NYAH argument.
Still, in his devastating follow-up post, "Epistemic
Closure, Technology, and the End of Distance," Sanchez levels those
arguments with the simple example of young Constance McMillan, from
small-town Fulton, Mississippi, who wanted to take her lesbian
girlfriend to the senior prom and wear a tuxedo. When the high school
canceled the prom rather than permit it, the ACLU took up her case, and
in the end, she was permitted her prom, but it was only her and a few
sympathetic students, including the disabled and some minorities, who
attended. Parents threw a prom for the "real" students, and set up a
website to attack little Constance for ruining their fun by simply
trying to be herself.
Sanchez points out that, when the website became public knowledge and
links went out, it was FLOODED with positive reinforcement for Constance
from ALL OVER THE COUNTRY, which shocked and SHUT UP the mean girls and
boys of Fulton, Mississippi and their bigoted parents.
Sanchez's point is that this increasingly narrow conservative loop
mistakenly thinks that it represents a large segment of the American
population's thought, when in reality, it is often shocked to learn that
it does not.
On April 9th, Jonathan Chait examines the phenomenon more closely in his
post,
"The Great Epistemic Debate," and describes the two schools of
thought, liberal and conservative, as best he can, namely, that
conservatism is monolithic, whereas liberals are not as prone to
groupthink.
But my favorite description of this difference came from a conservative
columnist who just won the Pulitzer Prize, Kathleen Parker. She writes
for the Washington Post, and first came to my attention when, during the
campaign, she dared to say that Sarah Palin was not qualified even to be vice-president, much less president, and was flooded with some 12,000
e-mails--mostly from right-wingers--cursing her and many, sending
death-threats.
At that time, she wrote, "Dixie Chicks, I hear ya."
So I laughed when she was describing the health care summit President
Obama called between Democratic and Republican senators, and she said
that, when they walked into the room the Republicans were all carrying
EXACTLY the same briefing book, period, and they were all carrying it in
the same way, cover out, so the television cameras could show it.
The Democrats, she said, came in carrying all kinds of stuff--each one,
something different.
So, from the get-go, we are a different mind-set. We Dems value
individualism. They SAY they value it, but in truth, they fear it,
because whenever it shows up in their own Party, they say, "OFF WITH
THEIR HEADS!"
By the time two weeks had passed from Mr. Sanchez's first posting, the
conservative blogosphere was in an uproar, and who better to take 'em on
than Andrew Sullivan?
In a slice-and-dice piece entitled, "The
Closing of the Conservative Mind, Ctd.," the former
conservative-turned-Obama supporter takes on right-wing critic Jonah Goldberg, who'd become
outright obsessed with the whole epistemic closure thing, which he was
certain that, whereas okay yeah maybe it DID exist it was also on the
liberal side nyah nyah and all the worst problems facing this country
had been caused by them anyway, to which Sullivan replied:
"Ah, yes. In the middle of the Bush administration's extreme extension
of
executive power and secrecy in the war against Jihadist terror, as the
GOP was spending like inebriated seamen on pork, entitlements and
defense, as Wall Street was gambling in a manner that wild-eyed liberals
like Richard Posner and Alan Greenspan have conceded was recklessly
irrational, as the Republicans embraced successful nation-building in
Iraq and Afghanistan as the sine qua non of American national
security ... Mr Goldberg decided that the real crisis was "liberal
fascism."
"To do so in that context is simply surreal. But inordinately successful
in the ideological-industrial complex that is enriching so many pundits
and killing conservatism as a serious attempt to govern the world as it
is. It's successful because the untethered bromides of the utopian right
are far easier to market than the awful choices and hard compromises
that the US now has to grapple with. But contemporary "conservatives" - a
lethal blend of denial, distraction and derangement - are not
interested in hard choices. They are interested in an alternative
reality, sustained by exactly the epistemic closure Goldberg wants - ah,
the circle closes - to distract from."
DENIAL. DISTRACTION. DERANGEMENT.
I liked those words so much that I almost put them in my title, but even Andrew
Sullivan couldn't top Alice in Wonderland to describe what's going on
here.
In the end, Sullivan referred us all to an outstanding post that is long
but well worth your time and trouble to read, by Conor Friedersdorf,
called, "Weaseling
out of Things is Important to Learn. It's What Separates Us from the
Animals...Except the Weasel."
In this post, he dissects and destroys every single argument out there
that the conservatives are putting forth to deny, distract, and crazy-up
the argument that they are not indulging in epistemic closure through
closed information loops and knowledge control, and through swift
beheading of apostates.
Like all thoughtful conservatives I have read in the past couple of
years, he expresses growing alarm at the very real problems facing our
country and our planet and the dearth of serious ideas being put forth
by conservatives to deal with them. As he points out, during the
campaign, every Democratic candidate had some form of health care reform
to discuss at length in debates and Republicans had nothing except some
vague Romneycare at the most, and at the least, constant harrangues of
Hillarycare.
And like most thoughtful conservatives, he took a dig at Sarah Palin,
because they all know that the kind of cutesty sound-bites that she's so
good at putting together may be popular to people like the ones arguing
with me in e-mails and comment sections but, at the highest levels of
government, where these desperate problems need powerful and careful solutions,
they don't get the job done, and should she or someone like her actually
garner enough votes to get elected, the country will be in very serious
trouble.
I've tried to explain to my deaf and blind right-wing family and friends that painting all supporters of Obama with a broad "far-left liberal" brush is counter-productive and not even true. My son is an Independent, a former Marine and Iraq war vet; my husband a Vietnam combat vet and moderate Republican; my daughter, a Hollywood actress. They all supported Barack Obama, but you can't slap the same brush across all three of them--it's insulting.
They are individuals with their own life experiences and own intelligent analysis of how current events affect their lives--they are NOT "Kool-Aid drinkers."
Makes no difference to the Glenn Beck followers and Sarah Palin fans. They are not listening. Socialists, all!
It is ironic to me that as much as the right-wing tried to portray Obama supporters as blank-eyed members of some sort of feverish cult, the truth is that cults actually work by RESTRICTING access to information--that is the FIRST thing they do to ensure loyalty of their followers. They work by trying to separate you from your family and friends by making them seem "other," or somehow "suspect," and to be feared.
The right-wing media machine works 24-7 to portray Obama as a subversive non-American who is working to undermine the constitution of the United States and deny "real" Americans their liberty. He is to be feared; his policies are deliberate attempts to weaken America and make us vulnerable to our enemies.
Anyone who disagrees with that is portrayed as somehow "unAmerican," or at least caught up in the cult of worship of him as some kind of messiah--yet another character (anti-Christ?)--to be feared or at least deeply suspected.
And any source of information that says otherwise is immediately tainted and stained with the LIBERAL label--NOT TO BE TRUSTED OR EVEN BELIEVED. Any poll, any statistic, any research finding, unless it comes from an approved conservative "think-tank."
If someone within the approved loop dares to speak out, they are "shunned" and excommunicated from the inner circle--banished to the dreaded LIBERAL MEDIA circuit, to be mocked, derided, and scorned--not to mention, FIRED, their livelihoods (and family health insurance) CUT OFF.
Which is quite a threat, don't you think?
This is epistemic closure.
And, I might add, it's what cults do.
And this is why we can't get into arguments with our conservative family and friends, period. They start from a place of utter contempt for our beliefs--and even, by extension, to some extent--us.
There is nothing we can say that they will respect, in spite of their protestations that they want to hear what we have to say because they are willing to listen to facts and figures that might change their minds.
In the upcoming months, my friends, my advice is this: Confine your remarks to Independents, disgruntled Dems thinking of not voting at all, people who haven't voted yet and haven't decided what they want to do, and so forth.
Anything else is a complete waste of energy and, in the long run, will only cost you a beloved friend or family member, and it is not worth it.
For the record, I will close by saying this: My right-wing, proudly gun-nut friend Robby, God bless him, called me up when he knew I was upset about this. He said that he knew that I was NOT close-minded, and that the dirty little secret was this: "We're out of power and we're pissed off about it. We want back in control, so some people attack others in arguments because they really don't have anything meaningful to say. In your case, they're not as well informed as you are, and they know it, and it pisses 'em off sometimes. Now, I'll argue guns with you all day long because that's my area of strength, but I won't argue other things. Still, I don't listen to talk radio any more because it bothers me, how extreme the talk has gotten in some ways. I worry about the safety of the president. I don't agree with a lot of what he's done, but I would never wish any harm on him, and I think everybody needs to chill out. There is no need for a lot of the rhetoric I hear on these radio shows, and I won't listen to it."
If conservatives like Robby can be run off by this closed loop, to some extent, then there are others who might not just turn off talk-radio, but turn off the Party altogether, and cross over to the Independent column.
They might be willing to listen.
And that's a start.
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