Monday, February 07, 2005
On punditry
In his latest smackdown of Jonah Goldberg, Juan Cole raises some trenchant points about the role and problem of "pundits".
We'll start with an oldie-but-goodie: "if you haven't read a printed-on-paper book on a topic, you aren't remotely qualified to pontificate about it":
My high school debate coach would bludgeon people with that one; especially people with an emotional stake in an issue (say, Israel-Palestine), but no intellectual chops.
My interest here is not on the content of the Cole-Goldberg debate, but about the larger issue of "why we have to listen to people like Goldberg in the first place". So I'm afraid I'll be editing out his retorts, and fast-forwarding to another nice nice jab from the historian:
Which reminds us that one problem with pundits (and blogs, and water cooler conversations) is that you can get away with silly, nonsensical rhetoric. In a book, Goldberg would have to explain why the degree to which an election is democratic depends on what happens years later; referees and editors would stop you and---well, maybe not at the presses Goldberg frequents.
Round three. Cole puts his finger on something important:
The American right-wing has called this play---the "judgment call", if you will---incessantly in recent decades. They prefer their values to others---and who doesn't prefer their own values---but they are so enamored, so confident that their values are "right", that they don't care what the facts are. Opponents might show that, regardless of whether their values are "correct", right-wing policies are failures, or that right-wing assessments of the state of the world are factually inaccurate, or right-wing statements are self-contradictory---and they don't care! Many educated people in the left and center (sane people with the ability to admit being wrong) would try to understand knowledge-based criticisms of their assumptions and conclusions, because we know that being wrong has consequences, and so we want to avoid being wrong. That is how we ensure that our values are realized in the world. Good intentions and stupid policies don't deliver good results.
People on the modern American right have an amazing faith that simply espousing their own values makes being right about everything else superfluous. There is clearly a parallel, maybe even an origin, in the bizarre belief that simply accepting Jesus as your "Savior" makes everything okay---no need for good works here! And there is an early exemplar in Reagan, who was so senile and so nutty that he couldn't tell reality from his own fictions---but he knew what his values were.
With followers and leaders like these, modern Republicans have become hopelessly lost intellectually. They seldom respond to factual or knowledge based arguments; bitterly regard instances when they have been proven unarguably wrong to be ideological, rather than intellectual defeats; and relentless respond to intellectual arguments with irrelevant value statements---the strategy of the judgment call.
More than anything else about the modern American right---more than its fascism, its greed, its recklessness and shortsightness, its cruelty and bloodlust---what I cannot stand is its disregard for knowledge. Their values are awful, maybe even evil. But their lack of the slightest respect for truth is something I can never accept, respect, or forgive.
How did we get into this mess? Isn't the media supposed to prevent such idiocy from gaining the highest ranks of power in a democracy? It would, if the media served as the collective expression and puzzling of a great society. But like any other function in our republic, it's not guaranteed. Instead---because many of us want it, and because rich, politically motivated wingnuts have sought it---we have a media that shuns expertise, knowledge, and logic for testosterone, pointless graphics, and overheated lies shouted in 30 second snippets. It has given prominence to ignorant hotheats like Jonah Goldberg, bent on sowing a simple, impossible ideology, even though there are thousands in our country who could use his position to help sort out the confusion of the modern world. I'll give Cole the last word.
We'll start with an oldie-but-goodie: "if you haven't read a printed-on-paper book on a topic, you aren't remotely qualified to pontificate about it":
I do not understand why CNN or NPR would hire someone to talk about Iraq policy who has not read a book on the subject under discussion. Actually, of course, it would be desirable that he had read more than one book. Books are nice. They are rectangular and soft and have information in them. They can even be consumed on airplanes. Goldberg should try one.
My high school debate coach would bludgeon people with that one; especially people with an emotional stake in an issue (say, Israel-Palestine), but no intellectual chops.
My interest here is not on the content of the Cole-Goldberg debate, but about the larger issue of "why we have to listen to people like Goldberg in the first place". So I'm afraid I'll be editing out his retorts, and fast-forwarding to another nice nice jab from the historian:
Goldberg also makes an elementary error in arguing that the fact that people in Iran are disillusioned with Khatami now, in 2005, has any bearing on their attitudes in 1997 when they first elected him. As a historian, Jonah, let me explain to you about this mistake. It is called "anachronism." It occurs when people argue that present conditions explain past ones. It doesn't work that way. Mostly because time's arrow goes forward, not backwards. I should explain that one too. It is called "the second law of thermodynamics." Apparently this law does not exist in Punditland, where the grand pooh-bahs are all permitted 3 anachronisms before breakfast.
Which reminds us that one problem with pundits (and blogs, and water cooler conversations) is that you can get away with silly, nonsensical rhetoric. In a book, Goldberg would have to explain why the degree to which an election is democratic depends on what happens years later; referees and editors would stop you and---well, maybe not at the presses Goldberg frequents.
Round three. Cole puts his finger on something important:
Goldberg is now saying that he did not challenge my knowledge of the Middle East, but my judgment. I take it he is saying that his judgment is superior to mine. But how would you tell whose judgment is superior? Of course, all this talk of "judgement" is code for "political agreement." Progressives think that other progressives have good judgment, conservatives think that other conservatives have good judgment. This is a tautology in reality. Goldberg believes that I am wrong because I disagree with him about X, and anyone who disagrees with him is wrong, and ipso facto lacks good judgment.
An argument that judgment matters but knowledge does not is profoundly anti-intellectual. It implies that we do not need ever to learn anything in order make mature decisions. We can just proceed off some simple ideological template and apply it to everything. This sort of thinking is part of what is wrong with this country. We wouldn't call a man in to fix our plumbing who knew nothing about plumbing, but we call pundits to address millions of people on subjects about which they know nothing of substance.
But I did not say that Goldberg's judgment is always faulty. I said he doesn't at the moment know what he is talking about when it comes to Iraq and the Middle East, and there is no reason anyone should pay attention to what he thinks about those subjects, as a result. If judgment means anything, it has to be grounded in at least a minimum amount of knowledge. Part of the implication of my assertion is that Goldberg could actually improve his knowledge of the Middle East and consequently could improve his judgment about it (although increased knowledge would only help judgment if it were used honestly and analytically). I don't think he is intrinsically ignorant, I think he is being wilfully ignorant.
The American right-wing has called this play---the "judgment call", if you will---incessantly in recent decades. They prefer their values to others---and who doesn't prefer their own values---but they are so enamored, so confident that their values are "right", that they don't care what the facts are. Opponents might show that, regardless of whether their values are "correct", right-wing policies are failures, or that right-wing assessments of the state of the world are factually inaccurate, or right-wing statements are self-contradictory---and they don't care! Many educated people in the left and center (sane people with the ability to admit being wrong) would try to understand knowledge-based criticisms of their assumptions and conclusions, because we know that being wrong has consequences, and so we want to avoid being wrong. That is how we ensure that our values are realized in the world. Good intentions and stupid policies don't deliver good results.
People on the modern American right have an amazing faith that simply espousing their own values makes being right about everything else superfluous. There is clearly a parallel, maybe even an origin, in the bizarre belief that simply accepting Jesus as your "Savior" makes everything okay---no need for good works here! And there is an early exemplar in Reagan, who was so senile and so nutty that he couldn't tell reality from his own fictions---but he knew what his values were.
With followers and leaders like these, modern Republicans have become hopelessly lost intellectually. They seldom respond to factual or knowledge based arguments; bitterly regard instances when they have been proven unarguably wrong to be ideological, rather than intellectual defeats; and relentless respond to intellectual arguments with irrelevant value statements---the strategy of the judgment call.
More than anything else about the modern American right---more than its fascism, its greed, its recklessness and shortsightness, its cruelty and bloodlust---what I cannot stand is its disregard for knowledge. Their values are awful, maybe even evil. But their lack of the slightest respect for truth is something I can never accept, respect, or forgive.
How did we get into this mess? Isn't the media supposed to prevent such idiocy from gaining the highest ranks of power in a democracy? It would, if the media served as the collective expression and puzzling of a great society. But like any other function in our republic, it's not guaranteed. Instead---because many of us want it, and because rich, politically motivated wingnuts have sought it---we have a media that shuns expertise, knowledge, and logic for testosterone, pointless graphics, and overheated lies shouted in 30 second snippets. It has given prominence to ignorant hotheats like Jonah Goldberg, bent on sowing a simple, impossible ideology, even though there are thousands in our country who could use his position to help sort out the confusion of the modern world. I'll give Cole the last word.
Goldberg is just a dime a dozen pundit. Cranky rich people hire sharp-tongued and relatively uninformed young people all the time and put them on the mass media to badmouth the poor, spread bigotry, exalt mindless militarism, promote anti-intellectualism, and ensure generally that rightwing views come to predominate even among people who are harmed by such policies. One of their jobs is to marginalize progressives by smearing them as unreliable.
The thing that really annoyed me about Goldberg's sniping was it reminded me of how our country got into this mess in Iraq. It was because a lot of ignorant but very powerful and visible people told the American people things that were not true. In some instances I believe that they lied. In other instances, they were simply too ignorant of the facts to know when an argument put forward about, say, Iraq, was ridiculous. For instance, it was constantly said that Iraqis were "secular." This allegation ignored four decades of radical Shiite organizing and revolutionary activity by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the al-Dawa Party, and others, as well as the influence on Iraqis of the Khomeini revolution and of the 1991 Saddam crackdown on Shiites. They were never contradicted when they said this on television, though.
And, of course, there was all that hype about Iraq being 2-4 years from having a nuclear weapon, which was either a Big Lie or a Dr. Strangelove fantasy. Khidir Hamza appears to have been paid by someone (and got big royalties from the American Enterprise Institute) to spin a web of complete lies about the Iraqi (non-existent by then) nuclear program. Goldberg in particular pushed that line, with his North Korea comparison, on a number of occasions. His current excuse is that other people were wrong, too. D'oh.
...
The corporate media failed the United States in 2002-2003. The US government failed the American people in 2002-2003. That empty, and often empty-headed punditry, which Jon Stewart destroyed so skilfully, played a big role in dragooning the American people into a wasteful and destructive elective war that threatens to warp American society and very possibly to end the free Republic we have managed to maintain for over 200 years.
