Identity Politics and Criticism, part two

My last post was on the way contemporary criticism functions primarily as personal criticism, and not merely criticism of ideas and the way this has infected discourse. I find that this all flows from a basic lack of charity toward people who think differently, believe differently, or see the world differently than you do. And this tendency is reinforced by a refusal to actually engage with the ideas of the best thinkers on the other side. The left treats all gun-rights advocates as if they are the unhinged nutball Alex Jones, and the right treats all pro-choice advocates as if they are the writer of this absolutely batshit crazy article. By refusing to deal with articulate representatives, allowing nuance into the conversation, we are confirmed in our own biases.

We conservatives make fun of Chris Matthews and the tingle in his leg over Obama or Keith Olberman's splenetic rants or pretty much anything written by Thomas Friedman or Maureen Dowd (and rightfully so). And we treat the left as if these are its representative members. 

The left, of course, does this with conservatives as well. Rush Limbaugh, the birther movement, the idiotic statement by Todd Akin, Glenn Beck's pseudo-history all comprise for them the substance of conservative ideas.

Bill O'Reilly doesn't interview Ezra Klein, and Chris Matthews doesn't interview Daniel Larison. That might murky the waters a bit for the base, showing humane and reasoned insights from the other side. Far too generous of a notion for cable news. Better to have fringe people on and yell at them. (CNN, for its part, tries to have both sides represented and is the only network my wife and I can stand to watch.)

I read an excellent article this past week by Maria Bustillos about the unintended effects of reading authors with whom you disagree. Bustillos, a committed liberal, read Edmund Burke, English philosopher, critic of the French revolution, and the grandfather of modern conservatism. She loved him. Loved his style, loved his turns of phrase. And she found this surprising. Wouldn't Burke, believing such wrong things, also write like an idiot?

I think conservatives who read a lot are apt to be less surprised by what Bustillos encountered in Burke, if only because most renowned authors of the past couple centuries have been liberals and conservatives are thus used to reading liberals having profound insights in beautiful prose. I am not shocked that I love Dickens or George Eliot or Tim O'Brien or others whom I would have disagreements with. The surprise might be more acute for a liberal to find out that Wallace Stevens was conservative, merely because successful poets are assumed to be liberal, than it is for me to find out that Yeats was a liberal. 

But not a lot of people read books, as a percentage of the general population that is, and I would guess that of those who do there are not many conservatives who have read Marx or Rousseau nor liberals who have read Burke or Oakeshotte. I remember in college reading Nietzsche and someone from my church asking me why I would bother taking the time to read the work of a godless heathen for pleasure (that is a paraphrase). Before you scoff, if you are of a liberal bent, how would one of your friends react to you reading The Purpose Driven Life for the plain old fun of it? 

We cloister ourselves in these little communities of like-minded people and like hothouse flowers in winter are unable to survive outside of that environment. I have a number of friends from graduate school who I cannot imagine having a life outside of the university. Everyone outside of their extremely liberal bubble they are likely to find a homophobic, misogynistic, racist, Bible-thumping hardliner. The way they talked about students, 18 year old kids out in the world for the first time just trying to figure stuff out, was disgraceful. People find it easy to berate homeschooling parents for sheltering their children from the world, but what in the hell other purpose does the modern English department serve for a different breed of fundamentalist? (This comparison is pretty apt. Most homeschooled kids turn out just great--I'm married to one--as do most graduates of English departments. However, there is the select breed that cannot leave home, only reads material on the approved list, wears weird clothing, and who no one outside of their small circle can understand.)

The effect this cloistering has on us is that we do not know how to communicate with each other because we have no meaningful interaction with each other. Since we have no meaningful interaction and conversely have been taught that the Other is Everything That is Wrong With the World, every ounce of criticism however benign becomes hyper-personal and we respond by challenging the humanity of the people opposing our views. That is how restrictions on abortion supported by over half of our country (including half of women) are turned into a Republican War on Women. And why every liberal call for even modest gun restriction is met with the you-can-pry-my-guns-from-my-cold-dead-fingers response. It is as if every political or personal disagreement presents an existential crisis. And that is just no good in terms of debate or in terms of the political future of our country. 

Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton engaged in a series of debates in 1928. They traded vicious personal barbs (at one point proceedings were interrupted because Chesterton was laughing so hard at one of Shaw's barbs directed against him), but they walked off the stage friends, and remained lifelong friends regularly pillorying the other in their works. This same spirit doesn't seem to exist today. A century ago even personal attacks could be laughed off, but now even the most benign attacks (remember that the genesis for this post was a blogger's mild disapproval of a poem) take on a sharp personal edge.

I don't really have a solution to this problem. The simplest thing would be to try and avoid this tendency yourself. To treat the other side with charity and dignity for, if no other reason, the sake of common humanity. This doesn't mean divesting oneself of passion, only making sure it stays in check and doesn't completely color the way you see other people who might disagree with you. It certainly doesn't mean divesting oneself of belief--Chesterton and Shaw certainly believed vastly different things--but not allowing belief to demonize others. 

And reach out across the aisle. I saw an article today by a gay activist who spent time with Dan Cathy, the CEO of Chick-fil-a, and he talks about how impressed he was by the character of Cathy and the genuine love and respect he has for the traditional family. They still wildly disagree with one another, but it is impossible now for either Cathy or Windmeyer to glibly characterize the other side as a bunch of people dragging us to Sodom or hateful bigots. When you actually know someone and what motivates them it is generally not as black and white as our dualist media tends to make it seem.