Are Cultural Commentators the Last People Who Should be Cultural Commentators?

And why we should respect people who don't want to be involved in the culture wars

Photo by Elimende Inagella on Unsplash

In a response to my one of my recent pieces about online arguments in which I cited social media commentators, one of them, whom I had cited making a solid liberal point, replied, “Such a queasy feeling to see my own name… . I wish I could just crawl under a rock and make it all go away.”

This struck me because it is an attitude I have encountered many times before when working with people seeking support with an authoritarian Critical Social Justice problem at their place of work, university or school. As a medical professional said to me last week about a ‘decolonise everything’ problem, “I wish I could turn a blind eye to these narratives, but they have crept into my everyday life and threaten to impact clinical decision-making in fundamental ways.” As somebody in the arts said a few days ago on the subject of CSJ approaches to trans activism, “If I just avoid the subject, we all get on really well. I don’t want to be alienating my friends and making my own life hard but I can’t just keep my mouth shut.” Supporting people who really don’t want to be addressing a problem with CSJ at all and are daunted by the very prospect, often to the point where they suffer degrees of stress and insomnia that negatively impact their health, by helping them to do so in the most principled, knowledgeable and diplomatic, yet firm and unambiguous, ways possible has been something I have done rather a lot of. This is why The Counterweight Handbook includes a section to help people decide how they can best address the problem based on their confidence and skills in verbal communication and their personality.

I have a particular admiration for people who reluctantly engage in the culture wars. Those people who really don’t want to rock the boat, prefer not to be in the spotlight, who are naturally conflict-averse or simply wish we could all just try to get along, but feel that they must speak up because the issue is just too important to remain silent merit a special degree of respect. They are addressing the issue because their conscience and their concern for their profession, for vulnerable people being impacted by an ideology or for the wellbeing of their community or country makes them feel they must rather than because they want to. Overcoming their natural inclinations to avoid conflict and live a quiet life in harmony with others to take a stand on an important issue and quite possibly receive a great deal of highly negative attention and aspersions against their character and motivations takes an extraordinary degree of integrity and strength. I don’t think this is always appreciated by those of us who choose to engage with politically or culturally sensitive issues in the full knowledge that we are likely to annoy very many people and receive a lot of negative feedback, much of it unjust, vicious and occasionally, even threatening.

Political and cultural writers or podcasters are a particular breed of people. We definitely have our good qualities. We tend to care deeply about social issues, be intellectually curious and, usually have a will to inform, explain, analyse and share ideas that we think will make the world a better place. However, those who are drawn to addressing political and cultural issues and making arguments about them tend to be, by nature, disagreeable. This is not a bad quality in itself. We need people to disagree with things that are happening in politics and culture and to make a strong case for why they do. Then other people can disagree with them and make an equally strong case for why that is and, in theory, the readers/viewers of these arguments can then consider their merits when making up their own minds on the important issues of the day.

However, we are also, typically, combative by nature which can manifest with varying degrees of charity and courtesy. We tend to be thick-skinned, a quality which can vary from an admirable resilience and willingness to engage with critique to downright insensitivity and imperviousness to any criticism, including that which has merit. We want to get people interested in certain ideas and inspire them to care about them which again can be done in a variety of ways ranging from being thoughtful, sincere and impassioned critics and argument-makers to blatant provocateurs engaging in gossip-mongering, hit-jobs and ‘clickbait’ tactics. We are always addressing an audience and our reputations and, sometimes, our incomes depend on pleasing that audience. With the best will in the world, we remain social mammals with powerful cognitive mechanisms incentivising us to conform to the narratives of our tribe. Maintaining principled integrity and a commitment to what is true against the pull of that drive to conform to a group narrative requires both willingness and ability to engage in honest introspection and high conscientiousness in our attempts to minimise our confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. Again, the degree to which political and cultural commentators are either willing or able to do this varies considerably.

The rules of the system for political and cultural commentary vary according to outlet and platform. And yet, there are rules and a system innately present in the very fact of being a person who chooses to engage with contentious topics publicly and who does so in such a way that gains an audience. That these rules and this system mean that political and cultural commentators are likely to be combative, thick-skinned, rhetorically skilled and strongly driven to seek an audience creates a selection pressure which may not always provide us with the most thoughtful, sensitive, nuanced, honestly introspective, receptive to criticism, plain-spoken and ethically consistent people who simply want to make the world a better place.

We can and should all try to be all of those things. We should consider ourselves to have a code of conduct that includes integrity, thoughtfulness, a commitment to the truth, a strong and transparent social conscience and a responsibility to engage in honest introspection to mitigate confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. The marketplace of ideas would certainly work far better if all commentators and all consumers of commentary valued those principles. But they don’t. The field of political and cultural commentary on the culture wars is something of a mess and this has been intensified hugely by the influence of social media and the proliferation of alternative forms of media. The natural tendency of the political and cultural commentator to be disagreeable and seek to have their arguments heard by as many people as possible combined with the tendency of so many of the consumers of such commentary to be drawn to the most hyperbolic voices who confirm what they already believe creates a feedback loop that can strongly incentivise less thoughtful and balanced arguments. As the most visible commentators on one ‘side’ of an issue become more combative and hyperbolic, so do those on the other side creating escalating polarisation which then both feeds the polarisation of broader society and is fed by it.

I do not know of a solution to this. Regulating forms of media, whether it is mainstream media, alternative media or social media cannot be the answer as we will then all be captive to the beliefs and values of whichever moral orthodoxy happens to have the power to do that at any time. This is known as ‘propaganda’ and rightly understood to be an injustice against the individual’s right to speak, listen, evaluate and conclude for him or herself. The genies of alternative media and social media are not going back in the bottle even if it were ethical to try. The marketplace of ideas has expanded hugely over the last fifteen years or so and in ways that may magnify the worst of human nature - our tribal and territorial qualities and our preference for neat narratives of good and evil over the reality of human messiness and complexity - and deluge the best of it - our ability to reason, evaluate evidence and exercise theory of mind to understand and empathise with those who think differently to us. The best we can hope for at the moment, I think, is that we will, on a cultural level, adjust to the deluge of custom-made narratives catering to every viewpoint no matter how extreme, become sickened by the rich feast of outrage and hyperbole and begin to crave a more nutritious diet of thoughtful, evidence-based, well-reasoned and balanced arguments. We can but hope. In the meantime, all political and cultural commentators can do is try to make their output fit in the latter category and still be engaging to a significant number of people. All consumers of such commentary can do is try to consume a varied diet of thoughtful and evidenced arguments from across the political spectrum, and avoid the lure of the junkfood of hyperbolic clickbait.

Above all, we can particularly respect the people who never wanted to be involved in the culture wars at all but have felt the need to speak out against an authoritarian, anti-scientific and irrational ideology gaining dominance in their organisations and communities. We should respect and support those whose values could be defined as progressive but who don’t believe that Critical Social Justice (woke) represents any positive form of progress. We should respect and support those who could be best understood as conservative but don’t think that right-wing populism or far-right views conserve anything good of our cultural heritage or traditions. We should listen to the reluctant combatants in the culture war who are not, by nature, disagreeable, thick-skinned or desirous of an audience and recognise that, by acting reluctantly on principle and out of a sense of duty to their organisation, community, profession or country, they are probably the least easily biased by ideological narratives and have the most valuable contributions to make. If we hope for that shift in culture towards a greater appreciation of what is true, what is reasonable, what is ethical, thoughtful and balanced, these are kinds of people who will drive it.