The Thomas Chronicles

see Part I

If being chastised for not slavishly follow one particular ideology isn’t enough– liberalism, conservativism, feminism, environmentalism, whatever-ism– you can also find yourself ostracized from the group collective. At work, sometimes when someone falls out of favor with the collective, suddenly they find themselves isolated. Co-workers suddenly don’t feel like socializing with you. Your job might even be in jeopardy.

I’ve observed this time and again. So, when I ran across this article on Foxnews yesterday, I could only nod my head.

These days everyone is so enthusiastic about the evolution of the Web, with its free content, interesting blogs, citizen journalism and the rest of it.

Not me. The big problem, as I see it, is the decline in general perspective, which is due to the decline in the popularity of newspapers and magazines.

By perspective, I mean generalized or common knowledge.

When you pick up The New York Times and look at the front page, you get a general perspective on world events. As you page through the newspaper, you see all sorts of interesting articles that you might not have read if you were merely surfing the Net for news.

Over time, this sort of happenstance approach to information gives a reader perspective on things. You have a sense as to what the economy is doing. You know if some international disaster has occurred. You are more tuned in.

This is going away.

…

… Kids under 21 don’t read newspapers. Many adults have stopped subscribing. The newspapers themselves are cheapening their product.

The New York Times recently laid off a bunch of reporters, who were replaced by bloggers and kids who just got out of journalism school. Probably all functionally good writers, they bring no life experience perspective to the table, and they probably lack world view perspective, too. And they are the ones doling out information to the masses.

…

Meanwhile, the public continues to read about what they already know. And they hang out only with like-minded people. There are huge cadres of people who are practically duplicates of each other. They all think alike, dress alike, and go to the same group-approved places.

With the slow death of newspapers, this beehive-like behavior is only going to get worse. And schools are not helping; they tend to have a political agenda and seem to limit, not enhance, world perspective. This is worsened by a de-emphasis on actual learning and an over-emphasis on personal self-esteem.

The self-esteem movement in education has fostered underachievers who are now out in the world of business, taking on jobs as clerks and cashiers. They can’t add. They can’t spell. They have no idea where Chicago is located on a map. They can’t read a map, in fact. They are seemingly stupid and mostly incompetent.

But hey, they think they are winners just because they’ve been told they are winners. It was drummed into them.

These people eat up information from the Internet and they believe everything they read. They pass along gossip as fact. They fall for every hoax under the sun (especially the very old ones).

[Emphasis is mine.]

There is a no more partisan place, no more contentious and ideologically polarizing place on planet earth than in cyberspace. Cloned ideas for like-minded people, who often congratulate each other for the rightness of their opinions.

If you’re looking for a place where there is a basic uniformity of opinion, various internet sites and pit stops inside the blogosphere should provide you with what you’re looking for. There are a very few notable exceptions, but in most blogs and other opinion sites, absolute conformity of ideas is darn near absolute. And should one stray from the particular ideology of the blog in the “Comments” sections, other commenters would be quick to berate, belittle and even curse the errant individual into either submission or silence.

On both the liberal and conservative end, there is this peculiar litany of characteristics and position, which, according to each respective political group, one must believe in order to be liberal or conservative. To be a “liberal”, you must believe in such and such, and to be a “conservative”, you must believe in this laundry list of convictions. If you’re a liberal, you have to hate Bush, believe in environmentalism, hate the war, and hand American foreign policy over to international organizations (i.e. lose our sovereignty). If you’re a conservative, you have to hate or agree to dispossess gays, support the war, and let market forces determine everything.

This, I believe, is childish; and what is more, this kind of thinking polarizes people and increases antagonism toward those with whom you would disagree. When both conservative and liberal blogs forcefully try to correct each other into the “pure” conservatism and “pure” liberalism, you end up with extremes. And just because lots of people force each other through the pressure of conformity to believe the same thing does not make it true.

An incredible instance of this is when the Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006. Talkshow hosts and bloggers blamed it on the Republicans not being “true” enough to their “conservative values”.

This is an incredible assertion when the party of “competence” bungled Katrina; when they were caught in scandals on the Hill; when they’ve dismissed the American people’s worries over the border; when they’ve treated the American people as their servants rather than the other way around; and they’ve done all this while waving the flag in America’s face and chanting their bigotry that gays don’t have a right to exist. Purity of ideology, I’m afraid, had little to do with it.

This is antithetical to a position arrived at through objectively reasoning the facts.

Society, communities and people are not neat tidy things that could be solved with a few tossed off platitudes. People are often contradictory in their beliefs and behaviors. People can do amazingly virtuous deeds on the one hand, like face down lynch mobs and tend to the sick in cancer wards, and then they can come home and do despicable things on the other hand, like beat their children and run down their spouse through constantly undermining and belittling.

We humans are NOT neat and tidy things– that’s just reality– and I am very skeptical of cure-all solutions or some idea that if we all get together and believe the same thing we can somehow transcend the seeds of corruption that is in us all.

No. We can’t.

What we need are working solutions that look to this reality, not utopias.

I think the liberal attitude of “Do as I say, when and how I want it done, because I know best” and the conservative attitude of “Take care of it yourself because I don’t want to spend the time and money on you” would both be calamities if they each get their way.

I suspect the solution is somewhere in between, and I also suspect it would be found in the least likely of places.

Read from the beginning in Part I

* Bookworm wrote a long-ish post on a related topic.

*Neo-neocon on the related subject of uniformity in academia.

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