Losing Control?

A Financial Times article on the redoubtable Glenn Beck, starts with the statement that the White House "lost control of the healthcare debate in August," a meme that reflects the conventional wisdom inside the beltway and repeated by most (but not all) national news pundits.


The article looks to the Glenn Beck phenomenon -- rising viewer numbers as national advertisers separate themselves from his incendiary attack on Obama et al -- as a learning opportunity. But what is learned?


First of all, control is in the mind of the pundit. The corollary is that control, outside the pundit's mind, does not correlate to the loudest voices and heat from a partisan crowd.


Glenn Beck has learned that incendiary language can deliver an audience big enough to provide a substantial income to him. Rush Limbaugh is a role model in this regard. I have a family acquaintance who has been a social friend of Rush's for some years. In social situations his political opinions are well hidden, or far short of his caffeine- and whatever-driven on-air rants. Perhaps Glenn has a private life, as well.


Being a talk show host is a job. If your goal is to build an audience base that delivers revenue, then you're certainly incented to keep pushing the language to keep pushing the audience. And Glenn is just doing his job.


Now, about that audience. After decades of scientific polling, through every vagary of historical upheaval, it is clear that are large groups, on both ends of our political spectrum, who are so identified with that viewpoint that reality that they are not likely to change, no matter what the opposing argument or candidate. However, those groups do not share the same values.


To make a gross but useful generalization, the right is less open to intellectual arguments than the left. Glenn Beck has found that his audience responds to emotional stimuli -- fear, anger, frustration -- and he feeds that emotional rush. But this is not the same as controlling the argument -- unless his audience controls the apparatus of government. And they don't.


Pundits, no less than Glenn, live in the present. "Today is the end of history. Political reality is the only reality. And no one will ever hold me account for what I said yesterday, or last week."


Now, that's control.

The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent

At the beginning of the last century, John Erskine, a young scholar in European literature and Columbia professor, delivered a lecture at Amherst on the subject of Virtue, as seen through the eyes of the western literary tradition. He observed that, at least since the time of the Anglo-Saxons, intelligence was considered a peril, and that English (and American) literature continued to support that judgment. I can think of clear examples in Beowulf, Paradise Lost and Tom Jones, for example. His essay also points to the English writers who thought that Intelligence was at least as important as Will or Innate Goodness, but makes it clear that our Anglo-Saxon-derived intellectual history generally distrusts the clever hero, and sides with the "natural" individual who has, at least, good intentions. (Pace George Bush and Karl Rove.)

In an introductory paragraph to a reprint of that address he summarizes with the thought that:

"... intelligence is one of the talents for the use of which we shall be called to account--that if we haven't exhausted every opportunity to know whether what we are doing is right, it will be no excuse for us to say that we meant well."

For me, this encapsulates the key divide in our political reality and challenges the dominant ethic of the neo-conservative right, which I interpret as: it doesn't matter what you do, as long as you meant well (or it achieves the ends you desire). Which only begs the question of how I am supposed to know what you meant.

I propose a couple of rules of thumb:

1. First, I cannot know with any certainty what is in your heart, nor can you know what's in mine. Any claim along those lines is by its nature inappropriate and untrustworthy; it cannot be part of any meaningful dialog, no matter how important as interior monolog.
2. We are left then with words and deed. Words are important, but must be verified, over time, by deeds; and deeds must be verified by consistency. Do your words match your actions? Do your actions display a rational guidance? Do mine?

My takeaway from this: Intelligence is not a trait, or a gift, like perfect pitch or sprinter's speed. Intelligence is a practice, a discipline, a commitment to questioning what we often call common sense and conventional wisdom. It is a recognition that our primary task is to see the world as it really is even when our perceptions and environments--and the tenor of the political and intellectual discussion surrounding us--seem to make it impossible.

In the sense that intelligence is a moral obligation, it is an obligation that this culture does not much respect, and of which much of our news and communication media seems to entirely unaware.