As an Opinion columnist, when opinions are commonplace and political views especially noxious, I have tried to cut under, reach over, look past - to preposition my way when facing the political. With no success. Legs of broken pistons, the tired hurdler sees one option: to go through.
Like a two-octave harmony at a John Legend benefit concert, a pitch of false tolerance has descended. Politeness is familiar to a college crowd told to "do what we want" or "whatever makes us happy," while yielding deference to others' values. The media, delivering and healing our national wounds, resorts to another term - a mantra for its therapeutic sessions: civility. Such glossed rhetoric, however useful to conceal the cracks of our relativism, is misleading.
Tolerance can sometimes feel intolerable. In the key decisions - one's religion, personal philosophy, even academic major - you do not merely select one choice, but against the alternatives. Not the "coolest" faith, but what you hold true; nor the discipline you "like," but classes that are essential, while the rest seem superfluous. In suppressing these dilemmas, we forget why we reached separate ideas and take for granted our rights to expression.
Democracy reveals itself in the unsettled conflicts, the unresolved viewpoints. Thus, arguments ought not be covered up, but bespoken. Otherwise, we begin to think opposing ideas are in fact equivalent. What psychologists might call "cognitive dissonance," we know by another term: doublethink.
It is interesting to note how George Orwell re-appears in today's polemic. And ironic that Orwell, who valued precise prose and political clarity in the English language, is so oft-misquoted by the American right: This little piggy went through security, that big brother to a Tea Party. In a strange about-face, the term "Orwellian" itself marches toward antigovernment propaganda. As Thomas Pynchon writes in a 2003 introduction to "1984," "Though 1984 has brought aid and comfort to generations of anticommunist ideologues with Pavlovian-response issues of their own, Orwell's politics were not only of the left, but to the left of left."
Orwell, a Democratic socialist, recognized the saturation of politics in contemporary life: "In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.'" But, as we were reminded Monday, by the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., politics need not be violent. Here, again, Orwell stings with prescience. Commenting on Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent resistance, Orwell addresses a shortcoming of civility. "Moreover the assumption, which served Gandhi so well in dealing with individuals, that all human beings are more or less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, needs to be seriously questioned. It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with lunatics."
Whatever shared traits exist between Jared Lee Loughner and Clay Duke, the shooter at a Florida school board meeting in December, in either mental or political temperament, there is one definite similarity: Both posted anti-authoritarian messages on the Internet. "The Internet," writes Pynchon in his introduction, is "a development that promises social control on a scale those quaint old 20th-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only dream about." For what does resistance mean when spoken by people who are updating their Facebook profiles and Youtube accounts?
In magnifying political struggles, casting these conflicts on a great scale, we dramatize their significance, ignoring the smaller, more important, more relevant battles in the "day-to-day trenches."
"The really important kind of freedom," continued David Foster Wallace in a 2005 commencement address, "involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day." Freedom from technological obsession. From prejudices. From politicized thinking.
Because if you're trying to invoke a message of freedom, of individual liberation, you're going to have to look a lot nearer than Big Brother. The chains are much smaller.
Aaron Eisen's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at a.eisen@cavalierdaily.com.
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