Are We Suffering a Paucity of Civility, or of Outrage?
Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine, has called for a "Covenant of Civility" in contemporary politics (see www.civilitycovenant.org). He's right to observe that the rhetoric of rage and ridicule on the right has degraded and debased what is left of the public square (or at least the considerable bandwidth under Rupert Murdoch's control). But the problem isn't a lack of manners. Rather, as Jonathan Schell wrote in The Nation during George W. Bush's administration, the public square is currently the operating theater for a direct assault on reason as such.
"If someone states to the world that he has a black dog when he does not, he is lying," Schell wrote. "But what do you call it if, in full sight of all, he says he has a black dog while pointing to a white dog?" (The parable was pointed at Bush's mendacious claim to know that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, in the absence of any evidence--the cause for a long and disastrous war there.) What you call it, Schell answered, "is cognitive torture. Just as hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, a lie is the tribute that vice pays to truth: The element of concealment pays respect to the hearer's demand to be told what is true. But if the 'lie' is out in the open--if any fool can see that the dog is white--then truth itself is disrespected."
Contempt for rationality remains the order of the day over at Fox News (to pull a name from the airwaves), and under the circumstance, keeping a civil tongue is not the first priority for those who still care about truth. So Brian Terrell's plea over at www.JesusRadicals.com for a "covenant of outrage" has prima facie appeal.
With Jim Wallis, I agree that those who care about truth will necessarily be committed to the sort of discourse that respects the open-minded. But that doesn't mean we won't raise our voices, and it doesn't mean we'll smile and nod when we're being fed pathos-laced bullshit from highly paid wordmongers like Glenn Beck and say, "well, you're entitled to your opinion."
"Each and every strategem of the principalities," William Stringfellow wrote (during the presidency of Richard Nixon), "seeks the death of the specific faculties of rational and moral comprehension that specially distinguish human beings from all other creatures. . . . Demonic aggression always aims at the immobilization or surrender or destruction of the mind and at the neutralization or abandonment or demoralization of the conscience" (An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land [Dallas: Word, 1973; Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2004], 97).
How should those who care about truth engage such demonic assault? "Civility" may be a tactical option, but it would not be one's first impulse on realizing one's neighbor's house was on fire. Eugene McCarraher, who teaches humanities at Villanova and writes for Commonweal, held out another option as the more appropriate response to the world order offered by George W. Bush's National Security Strategy of the United States (2003): namely, "skepticism--unyielding, uncivil, and corrosive":
Wht a harsh and dreadful love, we must disparage the martial and pecuniary faith that animates history's richest, most well-arm3ed, and parochial superpower. . . . [Un]embedded intellectuals must assault the winter palaces of embedded ideology, revitalize and enlarge the political community called church, and rekindle the political imagination called theology. Against the totems and sacraments of empire we must hurl the most intolerable and virtuous of insults" ("'The Most Intolerable of Insults': Remarks to Christian Infidels in the American Empire," in Wes Avram, ed., Anxious about Empire: Theological Essays on the New Global Realities [Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004], 104).
As Thomas Frank observes in Harpers, there have been times in U.S. history when reasonable people took to the streets in angry waves to call a halt to injustice and the plundering of the common good. Now we get wacko vigilantes who want more tax breaks for billionaires.
Each new presidential shrug--each preemptive sigh and slump of the shoulders telling us there's just nothing that can be done in Palestine or Iraq or Haiti or Detroit because, well, the people whose interests really matter wouldn't like it--is one more mark in the elaborate cartography of denial and obfuscation. It is also a dare to us to say loudly and clearly that we know better.
(Some of these thoughts appeared first in "A Famine of the Word: A Stringfellowian Reflection on the American Church Today," in The Bible in the Public Square: Reading the Signs of the Times, ed. C. B. Kittredge, E. B. Aitken, and J. A. Draper [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008], 185-96.)
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