How Long Before Criticizing E-Media Is "Hate Speech"?

When I decided to devote the second semester of freshman composition to a series of papers on “e-literacy”—to the impact, that is, of electronic communication upon the traditionally painstaking art of condensing thoughts into printed words—I wasn’t prepared for an uprising. Much to my amazement, I have found over the past two months that most undergraduate students fiercely, personally resent any insinuation that the high-tech lifestyle is not self-justifying. When the flawlessly deliberate Sven Birkerts advances the view (in Tolstoy’s Dictaphone) that a price is paid in lost individualism for massive networking, typical eighteen-year-olds declare themselves “offended”, as if some stranger had unceremoniously slapped their face. When the mild-mannered Robert Pinsky ponders through the person of his late father-in-law the mystery that technology’s pioneers are almost always social misfits, some are further offended, apparently supposing Pinsky himself to be the voice of the society deriding the “eccentric genius” or “nerd”… while others content themselves with announcing their extreme BOREDOM, as if Pinsky should have canned his nostalgic meditation upon realizing that he had not spiced it to their taste. Indeed, one of the most recurrent themes among my charges is that any writer is a fool who cannot keep his expressions within their range of familiar words and phrases—for what bright person would expect them to have a large vocabulary?

As I observed to these two sections yesterday (a total of about forty students), the responses they resister in their journals to our reading assignments go a long way to validating the case against high-tech communication. Their protests manifest giddy inattention, an imprisoning self-absorption, unreflective lunging and lashing out, thinking within a tight circle of clichés, tribally sorting remarks and authors into “us” and “them” based on a feather or a trace of warpaint… the whole array of character traits that profile a tech-addict accustomed to pushing buttons when he wants something and then vaporizing images when he wants no more. Grist for the same mill was the approbation registered by both classes for an author in Birkerts’s anthology who chronicled her conversion to e-mail: an absurdly pampered young woman educated at Berkeley who originally feared that such chatter might soil her hard drive, but who later discovered that—via e-mail—she could prattle at any hour of the day with high-flying college chums strewn around the planet. This, my students were convinced, was the true moral of the technological tale: only use it, and it will win you over. I restrained myself from remarking that such has always been the sales pitch of the slimy pander. Come on in, come on over—after the first taste, the first puff, the first frolic, you’ll look back at the Puritan that you used to be and laugh. I reminded myself that this is a generation which has typically crossed a great many lines, from drunk driving to fellatious sex to snorting a little coke, before leaving high school, often with the dull innocence of a savage retrieved from a hut of dung and clay. One must not expect its members to parse the tenses and moods of ethical treatises.

Yet the response I find the most vexing in student writing is the blanket reproach invoked by the word “negative”. Dare I say that I am OFFENDED when a young person labels something “negative” (or charges it with “negativity”, as if the sin dwelt in a Platonic abstraction condemned forever as negativitas)? My blood certainly boils, at any rate, when people whom I know to be intelligent and capable of thoughtful exchanges suppose themselves to have righteously put down the opposition because its members did not appear for the pep rally. What exactly does it mean to be negative? To be critical, perhaps? And to be critical means… it means quite literally “to exercise judgment” (from the Greek kritein). Now, very little in this world may be judged perfect. We point out the deficiencies of those we love and the flaws of that which we hope to improve because we wish to nurture success and happiness. In cases where the flaws seem persistent and premeditated, we may indeed not be kindly disposed; for here the criticized object or agent may threaten the very survival of our loved ones. Is our criticism fair? Then act upon it: chide the criticized for having justified it, not the whistle-blower for having forestalled a calamity. Is the criticism unjustified? Then criticize the accuser: charge him with carelessness, or reproach him as a vile slanderer (in which you run the risk, of course, of being labeled “negative”). Do not on any account, however, banish the accuser from your presence because you are not in the mood today to handle truths which obstruct your rosy fantasy of a flawless world. Banish yourself, rather, from the community of sane, thinking adults, and return whenever you recover. Or if you cannot recover—if rosy distortions are a chronic affliction—then betake yourself to an institution specializing in people who are not fit to confront life.

Of course, e-fantasies indulge the rosy-blind. Many of the contributors to Tolstoy’s Dictaphone (an anthology with several flaws, I might add) are aware of the political implications of withdrawal from a vibrant social community into an artificially created and sustained network. A great many of our young people, however, appear to me already beyond the reach of a literate redemption. At some level, I believe President Obama to be acutely sensitive to this. Why else does he stage daily photo-ops that keep him squarely on the universal screen almost around the clock, the lean, austere but serene multi-racial Moses of the Brave New World?

Stupidity and Megalomania: The Arsenic and Hemlock of the West's Final Years

It is always possible, I suppose, that certain people are simply imbeciles. In my advancing years, I tend to attribute a superior measure of sense and wit to seasoned, successful professionals who win election to our highest national offices; and I incline, therefore, to see their ghastly, indefensible miscalculations as window-dressing for a dark conspiracy. Such assumptions are sometimes ill-conceived. When the Speaker of the House pegs the number of jobs lost each month at a figure about 70% greater than our entire population, is corrected for it, and then repeats her gaffe within twenty-four hours… well, how many times do you have to put a shoe on the wrong foot to qualify as legally stupid?

One idiot grandmother aside (and what must she make of a trillion-dollar spending spree—what image, one wonders, do all these zeroes evoke in her flat-lining brain activity… does she know how many zeroes are in a trillion?), we still must contend with hundreds of members of Congress eager to blow the top off all spending restraints, some few of whom SURELY have above-average intelligence. I should like to ask them (the intelligent ones, I mean) the following questions. So we shall spend immense amounts of money which we do not have: whence shall we get it? China, say. How shall we ever pay it back? From the cornucopia of prosperity guaranteed (by some market-theory equivalent of the Easter Bunny) to ensue in the rosy future. From what operations shall we turn these lusty profits? More and bigger government, apparently. But with what money will consumers buy cars from government-financed manufacturers? Money they themselves receive from their government employment. And the government will have been loaned the money to pay these innumerable salaries by, say, China, whither we have shipped out all our real industries and white-collar private-sector jobs? Yes, of course. Well, then… government at all levels will thus be circulating cash so that consumers may afford government-owned or underwritten products with income supplied to them by government paychecks or given to them by government services? So it would seem, Socrates. Then the manufacture of products will not be determined by their success at fulfilling a specific need or demand, but by the willingness of government to underwrite said products… yes? Obviously. We must conclude, therefore—must we not—that the value of any product in this new order will issue, not from a given product’s intrinsic power to address certain needs or demands, but by the government’s estimate of a given producer’s power to keep numbers of workers occupied. No, that may not follow; for the public, having turned consumer, may think the product not worth buying at any price. But see here… if the government wishes to avoid laying off the producer’s employees and therefore subsidizes the manufacture of, say, glass houses or single-occupant fuel-efficient autos (for these products may also satisfy such noble objectives as environmental friendliness), the public may quite literally have the thing for nothing, or even—indirectly—be paid to make the purchase. Put that way, Socrates, your proposition may indeed hold.

If so, my friends, then I’m stumped. A being that cannot produce blood must eventually die—even a blood transfusion will not give the creature new life indefinitely. An economy that cannot supply its own essentials—food, shelter, transportation, defense, and so on—from its own resources and labor, but rather must import BOTH the building blocks of these necessities from other nations AND the money to fund a florition of non-essential services like waitressing, clerking, coding insurance claims, and processing sexual harassment paperwork (i.e., the kind of employment which is in fact booming among Americans), cannot long survive. We need industry. Our economy must offer, to our own consumers and to our trade partners, that which will not be refused in lean times. We must not become the bartenders, pimps, and clowns of the world’s rich and bored. We must pioneer new ways to grow healthy food, generate clean energy, and build precision weapons that neutralize bad guys with minimal collateral damage. How can we do any of this when, instead, we are constructing railroad museums in Cheyenne and creating films to introduce kindergartners to condoms? More bridges, more highways? We should be designing cities where people drive less than ever—we should be phasing out bridges and highways!

I return to my conspiracy theories—for I find it simply impossible to believe that so many successful professionals can be such morons. I believe, rather, that a significant portion of our leadership wishes to bankrupt us so as to forge some kind of merger with China, our chief creditor. I believe the eyes of these grandees are blinded with stardust: they see a new world order with one government ruling the planet’s masses, a paternalistic elite which will agree to dismantle all nuclear weapons and to double the beer ration on weekends—three-day weekends—if the masses behave. This, at least, makes a kind of sense to me. It is preposterously naïve and insufferably arrogant, as a vision… but it is not downright stupid. In fact, bright people are more than usually inclined to pipe-dreaming and egotism. They almost make one long for more idiots, on occasion.