The Discordance of American Discourse

Some time ago, a friend and I had a discussion on rhetoric. At issue, was the role and function of identification and the valid mechanisms by which rhetoric needs to be used. His criticism was that my reliance on an identity based model promoted a reification issue, wherein the subjective viewpoint was made objective by acknowledging the identity over the act. While I agreed with the criticism, my contention was that the issue of identification is a fundamental factor in every rhetorical construction. I want to take a few moments to elaborate on this issue of reification, as it plays a major role in why our rhetoric has become so divisive.

A bit of background on myself will also be helpful in seeing where I am coming from and the unique vantage it gives me in the larger issue of our national political moment. I, like probably many of you, follow several closed forum groups on Facebook. The purpose of these groups is to provide a productive and safe environment for individuals to come together and share their ideas among like-minded individuals without fear of needless, unproductive criticism and emotional browbeating. The forums I am a member of are largely progressively liberal (a few are actually for progressive political movements like OUR Revolution). While I affirm these closed forum groups have a significantly important utility in healing our discourse by allowing for like-minded people to come together and build strong coalitions, too often I see groupthink creep in and am reminded how we got this far.

In order for discourse to function properly, an argumentative principle needs to be maintained. This certainly exists in these closed forums, where members do hold variations in beliefs and attitudes which allow for clash and work toward productive resolutions to disagreements. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber make a clear case for this in their 2011 paper, where they quantitatively demonstrate argumentation as more central to our nature than the classically conceived notion of “pure reason”. A brief summary of the work can be accessed here in convenient TED Talk form. And I highly recommend their expanded arguments in their 2017 book. This research corroborates with much of the theorizing within argumentation theory, particularly the work of Walter Fisher, who describes human rationality as being narrativistic. For Fisher, narratives are founded on the “logic of good reasons”, wherein audiences determine the soundness of a narrative based on its coherence and fidelity. Mercier and Sperber’s research can be applied to Fisher’s paradigm to demonstrate how narratives can fuel our confirmation biases. As we seek out to defend our own arguments, we seek out coherent stories that have fidelity with our Weltanschauungs.

Before we get back to the significance of the forums, however, I have one more theorist to cover. Marshall McLuhan, a darling of the sixties and seventies, radically shook media theory with his immense body of work on media effects and pop culture. His key contributions in this discussion were his (at the time) oracular statements on the electronic age. To consolidate McLuhan in so short a space is a Sisyphustic challenge at worst and a Heraclean trial at best. For those interested, you can watch a great presentation of his work here. Of particular note is his work on media ecology and his ages of media, showing a progression of mediated technologies and the cultures they create (oral, literate, print, and electric). The electric age, which McLuhan begins with the invention of the telegraph, re-tribalizes us. As information speeds up, it becomes more accessible, radically transforming our society. Synthesizing this into the works of Fisher and Mercier and Sperber, what we see is that through the proliferation of electric/digital media, humans have come to access an immense amount of information in the form of narrative arguments. These arguments can be selected and pieced together to build a bulwark to our Weltanschauung against competing ones.

Now we can return to the forums and the balkanization of our political discourse. These forums become our new tribal centers. The town square of old has been exploded as our world has been shrunk by the speed at which information travels. However, this technological leap has occurred faster than our cultures seem to have been able to absorb it, scattering us like shrapnel. As our communities have moved away from the physical restrictions that once kept disparate tribal cultures in relative isolation, we are now all tied together: United by our division. What is needed is a new rhetoric (as aware as I am of the perpetual recurrence of the appeal) to find a means to handle this explosion of division and discordance. In the last thirty years alone, we have seen the proliferation of individualized notions of identity. The narcissism epidemic was forewarned in McLuhan’s Understanding Media where he ascribed the ailment to be symptomatic of our technological shift. Asserting that media is nothing more than an extension of our self (our ego), McLuhan wrote,

“It is this continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in relation to these images of ourselves. By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms.”

He continues,

“Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds new ways of modifying his technology.”

And ending with a diagnosis of our present age,

“The principle of numbness comes to play with electric technology, as with any other. We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed, or we will die. Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition. With our central nervous system strategically numbed, the tasks of conscious awareness and order are transferred to the physical life of man, so that for the first time he has become aware of technology as an extension of his physical body. Apparently this could not have happened before the electric age gave us the means of instant, total field awareness.”

In summation, the explosion of information perpetuated by the telegraph (the evolutionary ancestor to Twitter) has spread us from the epicenter in a blast pattern of variant and competing narratives. By isolating, we will only perpetuate our tribal narcissisms and fuel the confirmation biases of our egos. For McLuhan, this is as functional a characteristic of technology on the mind as narratives are for Fisher and argumentation is for Mercier and Sperber. We’ve closed ourselves off because the division has become immense. This is not an attack on the notion of the safe space or the need for self-care. These are psychologically crucial infrastructures to the argumentative process. What it is, is a call to action to challenge our own confirmation biases. A push for the critical evaluation of the self that scours our comfortable narratives by putting them through thorough testing. These closed forums can be a great space to begin that process, but we still need a working model to engage with those whose Weltanschauungs don’t align with our own.