Our mean, vicious race to the bottom
George Bernard Shaw has been credited with this timeless piece of advice, that “you can’t rationally argue out what wasn’t rationally argued in.”
After watching the circus that unfolded during the past couple weeks with the Republican and Democratic conventions, together with their rabid supporters and protestors, we Canadians shake our heads and smugly look down our noses at our southern neighbours.
Shaw also was known to favour eugenics, alphabet reform, organized religion, and opposed vaccinations. So I guess that would mean he would have been a Trump supporter. Yet his observation is as apt and useful today as it was back in his day.
My point is this: we are no dumber, more hateful, vitriolic, polarizing or steadfast in our beliefs today than at any other time in history. The difference now is that we each have our own 24-hour social media pulpit from which to scream our views at one another and without the accountability of making eye contact.
And despite having this medium to share ideas, learn, debate or discuss, we never waver from our starting position. Rather we double down on our fervent, dogmatic beliefs whenever presented with an opposing view or difference of opinion, careful never to give an inch of concession should it be construed as weakness. And as immovable as is our opinion, the greater the disdain for the other side.
You are either all right, or all wrong, elitist or brutish, against terror or a terrorist sympathizer, a great America or America in decline, free marketer or communist.
No longer is there a race to the middle. There is only the race to the bottom, the uglier, the meaner, the better.
This phenomenon has created a false dichotomy that our elected leaders present as a zero-sum game: If you elect Hillary you will get an entitled elitist, who will send American jobs overseas while she lies to the public and pillages the poor. If you elect Trump you will get a sociopath, hell bent on dividing Americans at home and isolating America abroad, kicking out anyone who isn’t white while only helping his Wall Street cronies.
As Charles Koch has said it’s like choosing between “cancer and a heart attack.”
Is this our new norm? Reality TV political leaders talking in sound bites and solving the world’s problems 140 characters at a time?
I don’t mind the viciousness but it’s the absolute impossibility for consensus that is most frightening to me. If we lose the ability to find commonality to solve the problems of today, we have lost the ability to debate and critically assess. We become lemmings and our franchise is threatened, democracy is under attack.
We can blame the process, like the primaries in the United States or the electoral system in Canada. But that is simply window dressing or shuffling the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.
The larger problem is the insufferable and inescapable intolerance of differing viewpoints. That to arrive at a different solution to a problem is to suggest ignorance, stupidity, indifference or vulgarity.
Our current state of political discourse is almost childlike. And like many of you, I’m waiting for the parents to come home and take charge. I won’t hold my breath. Sara MacIntyre is a principal at Elbows Up Communications. www.elbowsupcommunications.com