As a dual citizen, I had to appreciate this:
Here are the favorable/unfavorable ratings in the new national NBC/WSJ poll pic.twitter.com/DuYoxV5rbi
— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) September 21, 2016
via FiveThirtyEight.com. Note: I read their Significant Digits every day. Great site.
The other day I was browsing through my Facebook feed, which I do only occasionally, and becoming more and more annoyed at the politics posts. It’s not that I don’t care about politics; I do. It’s that I don’t like very much of what anyone says about politics on social media.
As I browsed, I scented a certain odor, and I thought the odor was familiar in some way, and not from reading about politics.
But first, let me talk about my cat. The cat you see in the picture to the left, at least mildly annoyed by having her picture taken, is Cheena. Now this post isn’t about cats. In fact, though I will talk about politics a bit, it isn’t really about politics. Nonetheless, Cheena the cat helped me along.
You see, I remember one day trying to explain Cheena to another cat person. She’s not that friendly, she’s a one-person cat, she’s stubborn, self-centered, and wants just her choice in attention. “So,” said this other cat person, “she’s a cat.”
Just so. She’s a cat. But you see, I’ve had many cats, and what I was trying to say was that, compared to the many other cats I have experienced, Cheena stands out for those characteristics. Pretty much every cat I’ve known makes its own decisions as to how long to sit on someone’s lap. But most of my cats, at least, have frequently curled up on my lap and purred. Cheena does this about every 3rd or 4th Christmas.
It’s about context. I could have been explaining how truly cat-like Cheena is, apart from, you know, fur, claws, and pointed ears. I would have used much the same words. But I wasn’t. I was talking in the context of the behavior of numerous cats, and trying to explain how Cheena differed from them.
It’s hard to accomplish that with just a few words. Someone who doesn’t want to take the time to understand Cheena’s behavior probably won’t get it. And why should they take the time? (I might note, however, that often people take more time to understand Cheena than they do many other things one might think more important.
So back to politics, remembering that I’m looking to illustrate something else. I wonder if any of us could give a five minute speech, much less an hour-long press conference, without saying something that could be extracted to produce an attack ad—or meme—against us.
The biggest problem I see with the political dialog is that very few people have taken time to look at the source and context of the material they present. (One of the most important purposes of finding a primary source, such as video of a speech, is to get the quoted line[s] in context. From Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” to Trump’s supposedly kicking a baby out of his rally, things get placed into whatever context a writer or sharer desires, irrespective of validity. Very few of these items are completely made up, but even fewer are totally truthful, representing the true intent and behavior of the person involved.
We tend to construe statements from our friends in the best possible light, while we construe those of opponents in the worst way possible. Sometimes we end up lying both times. Our person isn’t as good as we claim and the other guy isn’t as bad. But my call here isn’t for balance, but rather for accuracy. I find counts of positive and negative stories quite irrelevant. How much positive or negative information was there? Was it reported accurately and in accordance with its value? Was it sourced?
Many people share material without even reading it. The basis for sharing is not the accuracy of the content but whether they agree with the headline.
Now here’s a question. How may of you followed the link in the preceding paragraph? If you did follow it, how many of you realized it was a secondary source, and then followed the link to the primary source? Did you then read the actual study? Do you know what the methodology was? What social media platform was studied? How they determined shares vs. clicks? Do you think the headline of the secondary source was accurate?
We might want to blame social media for this, or perhaps the nature of politics. Politics is dirty business, after all. Yet I think we are all to blame, and we do it all the time.
Now where was it I had smelled this odor before?
It was in church.
Notice how in 1 Corinthians 1:11 Paul observes with indignation (and possibly feigned shock) that he has even heard that there are factions in that church. Sometimes we think factions simply refers to differences of opinion, but Paul is quite open to differences of opinion (e.g. Romans 14). There’s something that’s different about factions.
Factions build up around supporting one another no matter what, and putting down other people. Factions thrive on gossip. In Romans 1:29 we find “rumormonger” as one of the sins Paul lists showing how corrupt people are. Notice how many other words in the list there have to do with the way we talk about one another (slanderer, anyone?).
When someone whispers a juicy detail about another church member to us, and we repeat it, even if we preface it with “I don’t know if this is true, but I heard …”, we’re guilty of rumormongering, gossip, and slander. It’s a sin. Paul saw it as a sign of depravity. It’s endemic in our churches, and generally we are unrepentant about it. Oh—it’s a sin when you do it about people outside the church too, even a politician.
Gossip starts easily, and it can be stopped just as easily. If you want to see how it starts, just check the feed of your favorite social media platform, but don’t blame the technology. That’s precisely how those rumors about “Widow Brown” started in church. Someone says something they heard, or something they think might be the case, and the fire is started (James 3:5). And on it goes. We’ve all heard it. I suspect we’ve all been guilty of helping the flames spread at some point.
How can we stop this fire? Apply two tests to what you’ve heard: 1) Is it well-founded and accurate? and 2) Am I a person who needs to know this? Apply similar tests before you repeat: 1) Do I know the source and that it is accurate? and 2) Does the person I am about to tell need to know?
If it’s politics, it’s appropriate to pass accurate information on to those who need to decide their vote. In church, much more commonly the answer to the second question in each case is “no.” I know it’s hard to imagine, but we really don’t need to know the latest juicy story about our fellow church members. But even in politics we can ask the question of whether the information is actually of value. Should you pass on even accurate information about a candidate’s family? I’ll leave that to your conscience.
I demonstrated some of the ways to check out a story with the link I used above. That’s good for your political information. If you find a story that has no source, or that uses as a source someone who couldn’t possibly know the information, reject it immediately. If an article says that “a study shows” insist on finding the study itself. Could the research they did produce the answer they produced? If not, drop the subject. If the story says “____ said,” ask whether they could know or not.
In church, the procedure of Matthew 18:15-18. But first, make sure what you’re about to ask about is any of your business. If it’s not, dismiss it from your mind. If it is something that would be your business, going directly to the person is the best way to start. Afraid to go to that person? Don’t like confrontation? Then don’t share it. In fact, make “shut up” your default configuration.
And do it about politics too. Unless you truly know.
Ticket scalping. Civilization will surely fall if they don’t get together on this one!
Our crop of candidates, all parties and all levels are admirably intellectually equipped to guide our nation through the 1990s.
As an example, one need only look at the incidents of hacking and the response to them. This is only going to get worse. It may not be the next war, but at some point we will see a war fought entirely from computer terminals. With our dependence on technology, and lack of understanding of how it functions, we could see devastation without the use of physical weapons.
In this situation one careless or malicious individual can wreak massive havoc.
Too bad those we elect will be leading us into 2020 and not 2000.
Here.
There’s nothing quite so annoying as hearing people spin the polls.
Well, I am a non-partisan voter, i.e. I am not registered with either of the major parties, and today was primary day here in Florida. I had a grand total of two items to vote on: A county commission race that would be decided by the primary, and an issue to vote on.
Whenever there is anything to vote on I show up at the polls. I am surprised at the way people flock to presidential elections, but stay away in off years and in minor races. The issue today had to do with our taxes. What will the turnout be? (Note: It was above average for a primary election when I went through the line, but still not great.)
There are those who don’t vote because it is their conviction that they shouldn’t. I have no quarrel with them. I can disagree but it doesn’t bother me that they make a different choice. What bothers me is those who do vote sometimes, but can’t be bothered with off-year, primary (as applicable), and local elections.
These local elections do matter, both in determining local policies, and it developing those who will likely move on to some of those higher offices.
Probably as the result of the political correctness debate—well, perhaps not debate; more brouhaha—I hear or read frequent complaints about an expectation of courteous speech as though it’s an imposition. In order to cater to someone’s excessively fragile sensibilities, the argument goes, one is expected to deny the truth in favor of “political correctness.” In this case, political correctness is in quotes, because it tends to refer to even the mere suggestion that one might change one’s approach to presenting a viewpoint.
I do believe there is such a thing as political correctness. You identify it by taking note of the term political. It’s an officially imposed form of courtesy, carried out by policies such as speech codes. I’m vigorously opposed to speech codes in any sort of public institution. I think they are generally problematic in private institutions, though privately owned organizations should be able to make their own policies. As a publisher, I certainly maintain standards for what I will publish.
But the term “political correctness” has come to be applied to any expectation of courtesy, not just a code enforced by law or authority. Having hundreds or thousands of people disapprove of your speech does not censor you or deny you free speech. It merely means that those hundreds or thousands of people will disapprove of what you say. Which is their right.
Here’s an illustration of how to distinguish these ideas. Reasonably shortly after I turned 21 I realized that my driver’s license, by proving my birthday and thus my age, gave me the power to go see an X-rated movie. So, lacking good taste at the time, and apparently having money to waste, I found an “adult” cinema, showed my license, bought my ticket, and headed it to enjoy this privilege of age. Within five minutes I left again, never to return. I’m not totally prudish. I’ve watched some pretty hard “R” movies. I just insist on a story. One that the writers received more than pocket change to produce.
In that way I exercised an appropriate form of censorship on pornographic movies. I never again provided them with my hard-earned cash.
The alternative would be to go on a crusade to ban their product. I know many people who would do precisely that. I don’t plan to debate that issue in this post. What I want you to see is the difference.
An expectation of courtesy is not the same thing as a requirement that you be courteous. When a public university says that you must use certain terms in discussion, then that becomes a legal requirement. I call that political correctness. Why do I specify public? Because the university is taxpayer supported. I generally oppose speech codes in private schools as well, but in that case it is a matter of my support for genuine dialog, which requires genuine expression of a participant’s uncensored views, rather than an opposition to a public policy.
So what does this have to do with courtesy being for the other person?
Well, remember those hundreds, thousands, and I might add millions of people who may demand courtesy of you? The question for you is whether you prefer to just annoy them, or if you would like to get a hearing for your ideas. If you wish simply to annoy them, go ahead. Be my guest. You probably won’t be welcome as theirs. But if you have ideas that are important to you, ones you want to express truthfully and with vigor, you will need to consider your goal. If you want to get a hearing, you’ll need to combine “vigor” with “courtesy” or they will exercise their freedom and ignore you. Or, as often happens, abandon courtesy and treat you with the same contempt you show for them.
This applies to any discussion, including both religion and politics. Frequently I hear things that are claimed to be arguments for Christianity against atheism or some other viewpoint that are actually simply ways to make Christians feel better about themselves. Taunting atheists with “The fool has said in his heart, ‘there is no God’” (Psalm 14:1) is a good, simple example. To you it is “truth” and you are just exercising your human freedom and “telling it like it is.” You can then slap the back of laughing fellow-Christians or fist-bump, or whatever you want, congratulating yourself on the point you’ve made by telling the truth.
But you have likely simply made it harder for the next Christian who would like to engage that atheist in actual dialog about matters of faith.
“But I’m just quoting the Bible,” you say.
“Out of context,” I reply. Nowhere does the Bible tell you to taunt unbelievers by calling them fools. In fact, it says something quite different (Matthew 5:22).
We taunt fellow-Christians in similar ways. I remember a class I led some years back. Some of the participants had been spoken of in a negative way by other members of their church. They went around the group talking about the unfairness and how inappropriate it was to treat them this way. I couldn’t resist asking this: “Have you treated any non-believers as you have been treated by fellow church members?” Many admitted that they had.
I hardly need to provide examples of how we taunt people who disagree with us politically. Then quite frequently we taunt them again if they don’t want to stay around and listen to us taunt them.
If you want to isolate your ideas and grow your contituency only by raising new members from infants (and beware of them leaving!), then by all means, treat courtesy as an imposition. Regard it as something that keeps you from letting people know how things really are.
But if you’d like your ideas to spread, learn how to express the truth in a courteous manner.
Oh, and a note to all. Disagreeing with you or thinking you’re wrong isn’t discourteous. It’s a matter of the way things are expressed.
In the good old days when I had time to do fantasy role-playing games, stodgy traditionalists would object that it wasn’t real. Why spend your time on something that isn’t real? This was often said by people who would spend hours watching and discussing football games with approximately the same effect on reality. But I see one great advantage to those fantasy games (and to fantasy literature, for that matter). They don’t pretend to be real.
And thus I turn to the fantasy world of modern politics, in which speeches are written by teams of people who test out turns of phrase and issues on samples of target groups, then place the text on teleprompters to be read by otherwise often incoherent people. The issues emphasized in the politicians’ campaigns are not those the politician things are important. Rather, they are what researchers have determined seem important to the public. The solutions proposed are not those that the politician believes will really work. Instead, they are those that will sound good to a particular constituency.
The controversy about Melania Trump’s speech, with its plagiarized section, bundled the problems of our modern political discourse into one small package. A speaker uses plagiarized lines put there (accidentally) by a speechwriter, and never even recognized by the person presenting the speech. I’m not an apologist for Donald Trump or his campaign, but I can easily understand how this happens. The speech writers doubtless studied speeches by first ladies and potential first ladies for material. You get scraps of this stuff all over the computer, and eventually you drop the wrong one into place. Friends forgive you. Enemies won’t, but they wouldn’t in any case, so it doesn’t matter that much. The media spends huge amounts of time discussing it. Then bloggers like me discuss the whole thing all over again.
I don’t have any idea how close this was because I didn’t listen to or read the speech. I’m not an apologist for Donald Trump; in fact, I can think of huge numbers of things that I dislike about him. This doesn’t make the list.
Why? Because it’s part of that fantasy land that political marketing has created for us, the media propagates for us, and we go ahead and consume, no matter how much we may say we don’t believe the media. Yes, it’s our problem. Even those who most claim that the media is biased frequently let themselves be influenced by it. What they really mean when they say they don’t believe the media, is that they don’t believe it when it contradicts their prejudices. When it supports those prejudices it’s just fine. The people who put in the dollars know how it works. There’s a whole industry (at least one) built on hating the mainstream media.
When I speak, I do so either without notes or with the minimum of notes. I have occasionally used a prepared text, but I didn’t follow it, even though I did write it. Sometimes I have notes to tell me what topics to avoid due to limited time. If a politician wants me to listen to a speech, he or she will have to work in just that way. If your text is prepared, let it be your words. In all cases, let it be your ideas expressed your way. Then I’ll listen. I’m sorry, but in my preferred fantasy universe, speech writers would be out of a job.
I know that no politician can know everything necessary to handling the issues that the president must address. Fine! Let the candidate produce the team members who would talk about those issues, and have them talk about them. “Look,” says the candidate, “I’m not an expert on the middle east, but here’s the person whose judgment I trust most.” It could be sort of like the British shadow ministers, except that it lasts just for the campaign.
In the meantime, folks, politics is a great deal like a marketing campaign for widgets, except that there is no FTC to take the politicians to court for false advertising. In that atmosphere, a couple of plagiarized paragraphs might manage to be as important as one H2O molecule in the ocean.
I didn’t want to comment on the murder of 49 people in Orlando, not because I don’t sympathize with the victims or condemn the killing, but because I dislike getting tangled up in politics on this blog.
If a Christian commits an illegal act, we often separate him (or her) from “our” Christianity, or even claim that the perpetrator was not a Christian at all. From local history here in the Pensacola area, I recall Paul Hill who committed murder here at the entrance to an abortion clinic. Paul Hill was an ordained (and later defrocked) pastor. He built his view on principles that were held by a large number of Christians. Yet when he went so far as to take two lives because of those views there were those who said he wasn’t really a Christian.
That’s a claim of convenience. It keeps us clean. It prevents us from having to examine ourselves, and that is very unfortunate, even dangerous.
On the other hand, we have the problem of someone looking at Paul Hill and saying, “See! That is what Christians do! Paul Hill was a Christian and he was also a murderer. So also all Christians!” That is an equally dangerous view. A faith tradition as broad and varied as our own is bound to have some people who go off the rails. If some Christians are opposed to abortion as murder, someone is bound to decide to become a vigilante and “fix” the problem. This isn’t an argument against the view that abortion is murder. Rather, it tells us that human beings will carry things too far, or perhaps jump the rails to something completely different.
In fact, we can have similar results in society as a whole. I am always concerned when legislation is proposed and passed in the heat of emotions following an event. Rarely, I believe, is such legislation the best choice. We are capable of passing immoral laws because we are outraged by evil. Evil can generate more evil.
Neither blaming the entire group of which a person is a part, nor excluding that person from your own group will help. A person who, up to yesterday, you would have called part of your own religious (or other social) group has now committed a crime does not become something else when he commits a crime. He was something else while living among you. The terrorist, murderer, or child molester of tomorrow may be sitting down the pew from you in church. There are evil people out there and there are triggers waiting to start them on doing evil deeds.
The same is true of other faiths and social groups. There are Muslims who are appalled by acts of terror. There are Muslims who are evil. Just as we would wish to have the evildoer separated from our faith, and don’t like the idea of “Christian terrorist,” so Muslims would like to have terrorists separated from their faith. We don’t want to have all Christians blamed for the Paul Hills of the world. Muslims don’t want to all be blamed for the actions of one man in Orlando.
This is not a matter of numbers. Some will point out to me that there are more Muslims espousing terror and violence by far than Christians. I’m not going to argue the statistics. I recently spoke at an interfaith event along with a number of other people, including a Muslim Imam. He’s a fine person and an advocate of peace. He doesn’t cease to be those things because others commit acts of terror. He is who he is, and so are millions of others.
We need to grant them the courtesy we want people to grant us. We are each who we are apart from what other people who may claim the same label(s) does. Where attitudes of our group contribute, we need to fight that. In my experience, peace advocates tend to fight just such attitudes.
And then there are the victims. It was interesting watching who mentioned what. The victims were from the LGBT community, gathered at a place where one would expect to find them. It appears that the perpetrator of this act of terror hated and despised gay people. This is also a fact and needs to be mentioned. LGBT people are targetted these days for who they are. It’s monstrously wrong to do so and we need to be aware that it is happening and conscious of what makes that happen. Think: What is it in my language or behavior that might make someone else think a gay person is less of a person than I am? Then don’t do or say that.
We need to sympathize with those who are injured, and in doing so, we need to be willing to name them and to name the reasons they were targetted. We need to condemn evil, and at the same time give the same courtesy we would expect to the innocent.
About a year after 9/11 I was traveling and rode in a taxi with a driver who was a Sikh. I made bold and asked him whether he had been threatened following the attacks because of his appearance. I recognized him as Sikh, but he might easily have been misidentified as a Muslim (some Sikhs were). He told me that for several months he could not wear his turban because of the threats. It was unfortunate that a man with no connection to Islam, much less the terrorists, was treated in this way.
But it is equally unfortunate that Muslims with no connection to the terrorists are treated in that way because of hate for their group. We make every effort to be separated from evil acts by those who call themselves Christians. We should be equally sympathetic to those in other religious groups who are trying to do the same thing. It’s easier to blame the group. It’s more productive to be precise and accurate.
Not to mention more Christ-like.
