Bummer

I've just blocked a Facebook friend.

I didn't want to. But he gave me no choice.

Politics and Facebook is a volatile combination. But it's often possible to have a stimulating political discussion with somebody with whom you have nothing in common politically. I have friends on Facebook who are all over the political spectrum and with whom I disagree on just about every conceivable subject. In fact, I have founded a Facebook group dedicated to gathering such people together in one place where we can disagree, learn, enlighten one another, and remain friends despite our disagreements.

But that's hard to do these days. Mitt Romney said this to President Obama during the 2012 debates; I have no idea who said it originally. But no truer words were ever spoken: "You're entitled to your own opinion. But you're not entitled to your own facts."

Is it post-modernism, and its conviction that absolute truth is unknowable? Or is it simply the ongoing ghettoization of American life, the gathering of the people of our nation into warring tribes who no longer share the same values or, increasingly, even the same reality? Is it the emergence of the first true class-system in American history, in which we're divided from one another not simply by circumstance but by the opportunity to change our circumstances or the lack of that opportunity?

We live with people like ourselves. We talk with people like ourselves. We work with people like ourselves.  And pretty soon, we begin to believe that the only people who exist are people like ourselves and that our common prejudices are objective reality. We're living in the Age of the Echo Chamber, a time in which all of us tend to confuse the narrow circle of people whose backgrounds, attitudes, and beliefs we share with the entire population, and to confuse our own perspectives and prejudices with facts.

The discussion I just had concerned stuff that is so basic and fundamental that I'm amazed that anyone would question it. But I continue to be amazed. This guy claimed that the Nazis and the Klan were left-wing. In support of that bizarre premise, he cited all manner of alt-right and mainstream conservative sites. Some were simply crazy and just not credible. Others, he simply didn't understand. But he was absolutely impervious to having that shown to him. A great deal of what he had to say was simply incoherent. But the bottom line is that he was absolutely impervious to logic, and he had his own facts. He had lies, historical and otherwise, from alt-right websites. He had bizarre takes on reality which had nothing to recommend them other than their convenience to his own viewpoint. And he was absolutely inaccessible to any argument or authority, however magisterial, which contradicted them.

He didn't even understand his own arguments.

Under those conditions, the discussion is guaranteed to produce a great deal of heat but no light whatsoever. It is my policy, once I recognize those conditions, to terminate the conversation. No good can come of it. All that can happen is that frustration builds, feelings are hurt, and things are said on both sides that are better left unsaid.

But what do you do when the other guy just won't let it go? What do you do- and this is something that is almost becoming stylish, it's so frequent- when people with no credentials whatsoever claim superior knowledge of a subject on which you have quite valid and easily superior credentials and suggest that you are the ignorant one?

Well, if you're me, you terminate the discussion immediately, by the most courteous method possible but above all by the most direct one. I am not a patient man. I recognize that as a grave failing, but I do not suffer fools gladly. I wish I could, but I just don't have that gift. And I know that in that situation it's not a question of whether I'm going to lose my temper, but when. My immediate objective when I realize that I'm going to lose it is to get out of the discussion by any means necessary.

But what happens when the other guy won't let it go?

I like this guy. I would have loved to continue my Facebook relationship with him. But he just wouldn't accept my recommendation that we avoid discussing politics because nothing good was going to come of it. He continued his absurd game of one-upmanship from below, and I did what I had to do.

To a not-inconsiderable extent, last year's presidential election was a matter of the ignorant of the land nominating one of their own, and enough non-ignorant folks who were terrified of the alternative going along to get him elected. One cannot argue with willful ignorance. I keep reminding myself of that. I keep telling myself not to get drawn into these things, and reminding myself that nothing good can come of it. Nobody can be educated against his will.

And so more and more I find myself in this position. I feel sick about it. But what else can you do?

Militant, dogmatic ignorance is a phenomenon of the left as well as the right. Neo-atheists tend to be characterized by it. So do radical feminists and social justice warriors of every stripe. That I seem to be encountering it most frequently these days on the fashionable Know-Nothing and authoritarian right doesn't make it uniquely a conservative problem.

But as the mother of a friend of mine- a very conservative lady- used to be fond of repeating, "A man convinced against his will/Is of the same opinion still." Or, to cite another old saw with sad contemporary relevance, "A person can't be reasoned out of what he was never reasoned into."

I freely acknowledge my own membership in the brotherhood of Know-It-Alls. I know full well the embarrassment of having my own pompous ignorance exposed by better authority or better arguments for what it is. But what do you do with somebody who doesn't know enough to recognize such authority or such arguments, and adamantly maintains his assertion of utter nonsense in the face of both?

You can be embarrassed for him.  And you can get out of the conversation any way you can. Once one has recognized that state of affairs, no good can come of continuing it.

But we've already lost the ability to talk to one another. You can't block people in real life the way you can on Facebook. But what can you do when no possibility of intelligent discussion remains, but only further nonsense?

What, but walk away, and hope that someday something changes which will make further conversation possible- but knowing that it's not going to be anything you can possibly say now?

Comments

Popular Posts