I have never read Charles Johnson’s blog Little Green Footballs. I can recall visiting it perhaps two or three times over the past 8+ years I’ve been writing Rhetorica. I’ve merely been aware of it as a prominent blog. I have formed no opinion about Johnson or his blog because it would require my time and attention.
That remains true after having read Right-Wing Flame War! in The New York Times Sunday Magazine yesterday. Part of the reason that remains true is that I just don’t much care about the flame war the article chronicles, nor do I care much about the the early war-blog years. It’s all so 2003.
I’m introducing what I have to say with the above caveat because I think there’s something important in Jonathan Dee’s article that you should think about. That something I’m highlighting isn’t about Johnson or L.G.F. or the specifics mentioned in the paragraph I’m about the quote. I quote the entire paragraph merely to preserve a bit of context and not as a comment on anyone named. Here it is:
Regardless of whether Johnson’s view of Vlaams Belang is correct, it is notable that the party is defined for him entirely by the trail it has left on the Internet. This isn’t necessarily unfair — a speech, say, given by Dewinter isn’t any more or less valuable as evidence of his political positions depending on whether you read it (or watch it) on a screen or listen to it in a crowd — but it does have a certain flattening effect in terms of time: that hypothetical speech exists on the Internet in exactly the same way whether it was delivered in 2007 or 1997. The speaker will never put it behind him. (Just as Johnson, despite his very reasonable contention that he later changed his mind, will never be allowed to consign to the past a blog post he wrote in 2004 criticizing that judicial condemnation of Vlaams Belang as “a victory for European Islamic supremacist groups.”) It may be difficult to travel to Belgium and build the case that Filip Dewinter is not just a hateful character but an actual Nazi (and thus that those who can be linked to him are Nazi sympathizers), but sitting at your keyboard, there is no trick to it at all. Not only can the past never really be erased; it co-exists, in cyberspace, with the present, and an important type of context is destroyed. This is one reason that intellectual inflexibility has become such a hallmark of modern political discourse, and why, so often, no distinction is recognized between hypocrisy and changing your mind.
(One possible) Translation: The internet can make us stupid if we fail to think about context.
I never intended any symbolism by choosing gray as the dominant color for Rhetorica. But allow me to claim it retroactively. I’m liking the gray a lot more this morning. I’m thinking we need more shades of it out there in cyberspace. (I know: Good luck with that.)
The idea of ideas co-existing in time predates the internet. That’s the standard ontology of much of academia in which we discuss past thinkers as if they are still addressing us today in present tense, e.g. Protagoras claims X, but Corbett claims Y. The hope is, however, that academics discussing ideas this way think about thinkers in at least two contexts: 1) in relation to their times, and 2) in relation to their body of work. That second context allows that some thinkers may change their minds — something all good academics are quite comfortable with. Show me I’m right, and that’s cool. Show me I’m wrong and I learn something, which is better (or cooler).
In this sense, good academics make bad political partisans because it ain’t about winning; it’s about understanding. (Note: I use the qualifier “good” for a reason… oh, and “in the sense”).
I think Dee is correct that the hallmark of modern political discourse is “inflexibility.” I wouldn’t, however, call it “intellectual.” Perhaps “anti-intellectual inflexibility” is a better term. Then again, I also like “stupid.”
Technorati Tags: Blogging, Culture, Rhetoric
All I need is a coalition of the willing — two people, at least one from South Carolina.
