During my break from blogging, a wonderfully enlightening discussion took place in the comments to my last post, Changing A Mind: Mission (Near) Impossible Addendum. I am indebted to all my commenters for the serious and respectful approach they took to the discussion of the question of change. During the discussion, a good deal of momentum was generated by Dr. X's comments. He is a Psychoanalyst-Blogger who correctly pointed out the need to be extremely modest in suggesting that our understanding of the world is independent of our own unconscious distortions. (He has expanded on this in a recent post, Why Neo-cons Don't Change Their Minds About The War, which I will address in a future post.) Interestingly, Dr. X's post and mine are both attempts to understand change and resistance to change and both posts illustrate some of the pitfalls and conflicts that are inherent in the Blogosphere.
First of all, anyone who reads Blogs comes to the Blogosphere with a sense of curiosity and an often uncomfortable feeling that the "framing" of the media narrative, which has been the primary source of our information about the larger world that is not immediately available to our senses, was incomplete at best, and distorted in significant ways at worst. Readers who have progressed to commenting are people who not only have such interests but have taken it upon themselves to take an active role in propelling the discussion forward. By the time a reader/commenter has decided to start their own blog, it is almost always because they feel they have more to add to the expanding Blogosphere discussion than can be contained within even the most felicitous Blogger's comment section. In this way, the Blogosphere is deeply democratic; anyone with the desire and energy can Blog. However, shortly after starting to Blog, all Bloggers face certain dilemmas:
Is the Blog primarily for the expression of my own thoughts and interests (an essentially autistic construction) or do I care about gaining and/or keeping an audience (a jointly constructed dialogue)?
[NB: I am leaving out Aggregator Blogs like Instapundit because their goal is to advance the discussion indirectly; among Blogs that argue more directly, it is worth noting that recently the three Powerline proprietors began a discussion section, which is instructive about the value of the constructed dialog.]
In Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, when the treatment works best, the process becomes a jointly constructed narrative effort; ultimately, the therapist and patient working together can achieve much more than either working alone. This is one reason that patients who come into treatment for "advice" can never really change in fundamental ways. [I am excluding here those individuals who seek help with situational distress and do not need or desire deeper awareness or change.]
Once a Blogger has an audience the desire to keep or expand his/her audience begins to influence their blogging in ways that often lead to problems. For example, recognizing that our behavior is the compromise of multiple, primarily unconscious, determinants suggests we should maintain our modesty about our conclusions, yet a Blog that surrounds all of its arguments with qualifiers is likely to be a rather dull read. (I read enough "sophisticated" Psychoanalytic literature to know that the best way to lose the reader's attention is to eschew declarative sentences.) Simple and sharp delineations are favored; furthermore, oversimplified terms, like "liberal" and "neo-conservative", loaded as they are with the great weight of our projections, become bandied about with reckless abandon and are then over-interpreted by readers and writers alike. Yet without such terms, the act of writing a Blog post would require redefining specifics at every occasion. Aside from being unwieldy, it would also rather quickly grow exhausting for all.
And there's more. I enjoy writing and enjoy using interesting vocabulary and constructions. When I read a post and don't understand a word or concept, I enjoy doing some research to see if I can better grasp what the writer is trying to say. At the same time, I can understand how my writing can come across as both arrogant and exhibiting a certainty that I often can't, and don't, fully support. I also tend to write long posts that can tax the patience of even my most loyal readers (as my family and friends have told me on more than one occasion.)
Where does that leave me? I would like to explore these questions a bit more in the next few days, with examples, and see if I can develop a coherent strategy for deriving value from Blogs. I think that if we read Blogs with an awareness of the pitfalls of the Blogger, it may make it easier to comment in a civil fashion and move the evolving, often cacophonous discussion known as the Blogosphere, forward.
Two points that I made in some of my very first posts, from the pre-historic (in Blogosphere time) days of January 2005, are worth repeating here.
In Progressives and Totalitarianism: An Irrational Marriage, I wrote:
We remain rational creatures, just barely, by constantly reasserting our rationality over our irrationality; civilization depends on the balance of the rational out weighing the irrational; when the balance is upset (for example, when a state is taken over by a pseudo-scientific ideology which is deeply irrational) the state will inevitably fail.
And:
When people do not recognize their own irrationality, their own hidden motivations, there is usually a good reason for this self deception; it is almost always based on poorly perceived threats to the self.
I would argue that only a Democratic system has any hope of finding rational outcomes from the complex interplay of individual and group irrationality.
A few days after I wrote that post, in Vox Bloguli, I wrote the following:
Democracy works essentially by summing the irrationalities of its citizenry in ways which tend to cancel out the most extreme manifestations. When it works well, both parties move to the center and try to appeal to the broad, more rational middle. This depends on a number of important factors, one of which is relatively unbiased information.
In my humble opinion, the Blogosphere has the potential to assist in both the process of "summing our irrationalities" and increasing the availability of unbiased information (derived from summing the biased information that is all we can ever have access to.)
More to follow...
Recent Comments