Below is an article I recently wrote for American Thinker, which ran a truncated version on Feb 22. Given my topic, I was amused to see that their website describes their mission as follows: “We want to advance the national conversation with fresh insight”.
We Don’t Need a National Conversation about Guns (or Nearly Anything Else)
I was, up until the Sunday afterward, blissfully ignorant of the horrific shooting that occurred in Parkland, Florida three days prior. Upon learning of the shooting, my heart sank. Sorrow turned to anger, frustration, and despair as I learned more details. Anger at the misinformation. No, the shooter wasn’t associated with a white supremacist group. Frustration at the preventability of this tragedy had the police and FBI done their jobs in following protocols and enforcing laws already in place. And despair that, judging by the deep divisions between us so apparent on social media, those who predict another civil war in this country may well be right.
Maybe I was better off not knowing. Maybe most of us would have been. Can knowing less national news, somewhat paradoxically, make for a broader, more accurate, and healthier perspective as a citizen? Does promoting a “national conversation” about this or that problem—most recently, gun control—do more harm than good? I think so. Being exposed to a constant cacophony of problems, the vast majority of which do not personally affect us, nonetheless engenders social unrest that does affect us. Just look at your social media feeds. Despite its ostensible purpose of “connecting” us, social media is, in fact, tearing us apart. Anti-American forces, foreign and domestic, know this and are doing what they can to exacerbate the problem.
It would be hard to exaggerate how much this sense of social unrest primes us to accept leftist philosophy: the problems seem so many and beyond our control that we might begin thinking that only something as big as the federal government can have the solutions. So we give it more power. Don’t miss the irony: in response to our sense of powerlessness, we relinquish more power. This is how the Leviathan grows. It would quickly starve if we just removed ourselves from the “national conversation” — or at least what is commonly meant by that term.
In another sense, engaging in a national conversation is our civic duty. This is, in effect, what national elections and congressional voting sessions are. But apart from our limited and infrequent contributions to those, there really is no national conversation to be had precisely because of our impotence at a national level. And this is a good thing.
Think about it. When someone close faces a problem, there is a sense, beyond merely being empathetic, in which we take their problem on as our own. We have a shared interest in each other’s flourishing, and in virtue of our intimacy we have privileged authority and insight and into the conditions of our flourishing. The more intimately acquainted we are with someone, the likelier we are to know just what they need. The converse also holds. The less intimately acquainted we are with someone, the less likely we are to know what they need, and the less authority we have to speak to their problem. And there is a point of distance when other peoples’ problems cease being our own, not because we don’t care, but because we are impotent to solve them.
National news media outlets of all varieties conspire to create the illusion of intimacy in matters that are almost always distant, and with it the illusion of authority and insight into those matters. If they’re telling me about something, I suppose I ought to know about it. And if I ought to know about it, I suppose I ought to do something. But when I discover I am powerless to do anything with the information I’ve been given, and yet dissonantly believe I need to know it, I get angry, frustrated, and fall into despair. At last, I feed the Leviathan.
The philosophical underpinnings of the irony here was perhaps best articulated by Neil Postman in his classic book Amusing Ourselves to Death. When it comes to national news, which largely consists of information irrelevant to me, knowledge is not power. It leads instead, in Postman’s words, to “diminished social and political potency.” Prior to the advent of mass media technologies, the value of information was determined by how it affected my actions, and was disseminated and consumed accordingly. Back then, “the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives.” Contrast that with the sense of control we get from information that has little to no action-value by asking yourself a series of questions like the following:
What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha-is in Iran?
And we might add: what steps do you plan to take to reduce gun violence? The answer to these questions is: none, really. The most a civilized person can do is cast a vote every few years and hope for the best. Thus, the excessive consumption of national news encouraged by mass media has only served to “dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence.” While mass media technologies “may have made the country ‘one neighborhood,’” Postman observes, “it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other.” And if we need proof of how quickly we can get nasty with strangers, just consider road rage. As common as it is, its virtual equivalent on the world wide roadways of the web is all the more. Armed with nothing but the most superficial facts about each other, we reconcile our belief in the importance of national news with our powerlessness to do anything with it by engaging in a “national conversation” – which is rarely more than impulsive snark, slogans, memes, and misinformation. It does more harm than good.
To combat the increasing sense of social unrest, we should replace the norm of interest in national affairs, created by excessive devotion to national news by mass media outlets, with an interest in the local affairs of our own state, county, community, and family. It was, after all, the conviction that local concerns should take precedence over the non-local that gave birth to our country (bye bye Britain!) and the principles upon which it was founded (Federalism, subsidiarity). We have bucked this conviction to our detriment. It is no secret that the guarantee of national exposure motivates mass shooters. That same guarantee is exploited by terrorists. And there is no doubt that national attention given to a handful of controversial police shootings is responsible for the myth that blacks are disproportionately victimized by law enforcement in the United States. Similar national attention given to isolated incidents of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. are responsible for the myth that these are systemic problems in America. And as these “national conversations” continue, our sense of powerlessness grows, and the Leviathian right along with it.
I’m not recommending that we be luddites or political ostriches with our heads buried in the sand. But the wisdom in what Rod Dreher calls The Benedict Option is becoming clearer by the day. At the very least, we need to periodically take a rest from what is causing so much unrest. Turn off the TV and radio. Take a break from Facebook and Twitter. Don’t look at your cell phone. Doing so would be for the good of not just our own souls, but the soul of the country as well.
