In favor of conversation over cockfight

I like to think. I don’t always come up with an answer, but I still like to think, to ponder, to really dig inside an issue and try to work my way out again. 

But I’ve never liked to debate. 

To converse, yes. Even to converse when the other party thinks quite differently from me. But I’ve never liked the kind of debate in which both participants wind up feeling the need to condense their thoughts into manageable missiles.

When I joined the IDS to write an opinion column, it was a challenge to myself to learn how to represent what I think in a way that could pass for debate without having that unfortunate quality of being reactionary and abbreviated beyond recognition or reason.
Some might say I haven’t met my own challenge, but I hope some would say I have.

The world of news media and immediate commentary can be a world where ideas are lost in the background of sound bite and rejoinder. What is particularly sad about that fact is that the news media, the blogosphere and the ability to share one’s thoughts without censorship are what should be driving our modern society to have more ideas, not fewer.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I sometimes like to think that I’ll log onto a news website one day and see the 3,000 comments be about 3,000 different ways of seeing things — and 3,000 realizations that one’s own way is not the only way.

I sometimes like to think that a comment board could get actual philosophical work done and change politics through a conversation that changes minds.

But somehow, today’s news media are not like that dream. They’re festering pots of polarization and reaction with only a few lights of reason in the whole mess.

They’ve lost that power of connection of minds and substituted it with cockfights instead.

Maybe it’s a naive sentiment, but I’ve always wondered exactly how millions upon millions of people could have only two or three sides which they considered worth
defending.

That’s a kind of convergence I don’t think I understand.

So maybe that is the hallmark of the Internet age: a bottlenecking effect, such that only the masses of people who think alike get to have their ideas broadcasted. But I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of what instantaneous media can do.

There is also potential for something more revolutionary, something more satisfactory. There is potential for everyone getting their ideas broadcasted and for broadcasting new ideas that are seeking an audience that has never thought of them before.

That is what I always expect to see, like some excited child on Christmas morning, every time I read the comments section of an interesting article in The New York Times or the IDS. 

That’s what I expect — new ideas, well-thought-out ideas, ideas that have the power to change or add ever so slightly to what I think. I never expect a cockfight. But that’s usually what I find.  


E-mail: cmcglass@indiana.edu