Quod Scripsi, Scripsi

Reader: I wasn’t quoting you.  I was characterizing your analysis as such.

Me: You were mischaracterizing my analysis.  What I have written, I have written.  What you have written, I did not.

Reader: Says you.

Words have meaning.  We live our lives, for the most part, in a world in which, on a clear spring day, one can say, “The sky is blue,” and everyone else will cheerfully agree (or wonder why you’re bothering to state the obvious).  When we make plans to meet at five o’clock at the Rusty Dog for a drink, no one thinks that means a slice of pumpkin pie at Nick’s Kitchen at 7:30.  We routinely travel at our own pace on the highway, but we all understand how fast we’re supposed to be going when we see the words SPEED LIMIT 70.

Community depends on our ability to communicate.  Language barriers don’t make community impossible, but they do make it much harder to achieve.  If you don’t know a word of French, you’re not likely to feel at home in the streets of Paris, much less in a village in Bretagne.  And if you don’t know that the cheese toastie listed on the menu is localspeak for a grilled-cheese sandwich or understand why the waitress is asking you if you’d like a sack for your leftovers, you might feel a bit out of sorts when you first move to Northeast Indiana.

As daunting as it is for most of us to learn a foreign language, we can do so if necessary, and coming to understand and eventually adopt regionalisms is a sign that you’re taking root in a community.  Stubbornly insisting on speaking only English in a café in Brest or asking a waitress in Fort Wayne to put the remains of your child’s grilled-cheese sandwich in a bag is a sign that, at best, you’re an outsider who wishes to remain that way, and more likely that you’re an ass.  We expect people to try to make themselves understood, and when they do, most of us, most of the time, will make an effort to try to understand them.

Or at least, once upon a time, we did.  Today, when discussing any subject that is in the least bit controversial, more and more Americans not only are unwilling to make any effort to understand others but seem to consider such willingness a weakness.  It is not necessary to understand what another person is saying; it is only necessary to decide where he stands in relation to you.  Once you have made that determination—rightly or wrongly—you can judge everything he says without actually hearing or reading, much less understanding, a word.

As late as 30 years ago, self-identified conservatives still prided themselves on their embrace of logic and reason and evidence.  By then, fewer and fewer of them were studying philosophy or reading history, but they continued to acknowledge the value of both.  Against the rise of an illiberal left that was increasingly embracing the irrationalism of deconstructionism and postmodernism, they continued to defend clarity of thought and expression.

Those days are long gone.  Today, when it comes to his attitudes toward the importance of language and logic and clarity of thought and expression, the average political conservative is just as much in thrall to deconstructionism and postmodernism as the average political liberal.  He would vociferously deny it, of course.  Conservatives don’t believe in such things, just as they didn’t use to believe in divorce or abortion or gay marriage—until, of course they did.  We are all good liberals now.

It may be tempting to blame this change in attitudes among conservatives on the rise of Donald Trump, but his inability to separate what is true from what he wishes to be true is more a symptom of this malady than a cause.

The true cause was what Russell Kirk called “the conservative rout” (the original title of what became The Conservative Mind).  The essence of the revolt of modernity against the classical and Christian world consisted in the subjugation of more and more of human life to politics.  The conservative counterrevolution, from Burke to Kirk, fought to contain politics within its proper—and limited—sphere, and to reassert the primacy of religion and culture.

The left’s Long March Through the Institutions didn’t begin with Antonio Gramsci and his disciples; they simply put a name, and brought a clear sense of purpose, to a movement that began in the Renaissance, achieved full force in the French Revolution, and reached its nadir when conservatives decided that President Reagan had it wrong in his First Inaugural Address: Government was the solution to the problem after all.  The triumph of politics over religion and culture was complete; everything since then has been nothing more than the logic of the revolution playing itself out.

And that includes the rise of scorn for clarity of thought and expression, both in one’s own utterances and in the words of others.  The lines that I quoted at the beginning of this column are repeated incessantly (though usually not quite so succinctly) by self-proclaimed conservatives on conservative (in this case, conservative Catholic) websites, and of course on social media.  We no longer take others’ words seriously, because we are no longer serious in the choice of our own words.  Language was once a tool for expressing truth; now, it is merely a weapon for winning arguments.  The ends justify the means, and the truth be damned.

First published in the December 2018 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The Telegraph and the Clothesline

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Communication, in the abstract, is easier today than it has ever been before, largely because of the advance of technology.  From the telegraph to the telephone to the radio to the television to the Internet, the ability to communicate something—anything—to others, and to an ever-greater number of others, has become increasingly trivial, both in labor and in economic cost.  In this sense, the Information Revolution has been a revolution indeed; but whether it has truly been informative, in the sense of providing people with more and more of the information that is actually meaningful, is still an open question.

Indeed, there is reason to believe that much of what each of us could truly benefit from knowing has been lost in the flood of the asynchronous transfer of data—“communication without conversation,” as I called it last month.  Here and there, that realization may creep into our consciousness in unexpected ways.  The average person takes far more photographs today than ever before, yet he has far fewer of those photos preserved in a physical form, with fewer if any pictures of his family hanging on his walls.  He writes more emails to friends and relatives than any previous generation wrote letters; but the historian of the future will have a harder time reconstructing the everyday life of an average American in the first decades of the 21st century than historians today have in fleshing out the picture of the lives of those who fought in Vietnam or even in the Civil War, and not just because few of those emails are likely to be preserved; the content itself is banal at best and usually utterly ephemeral.  National and international news—or rather, those tiny slivers of it that vast media companies decide to present to us—is available to everyone with access to the airwaves or the Internet, but in most of the country, local news has never been harder to come by.  Even the clothesline telegraph—neighbors swapping gossip over the back fence—has fallen victim to the same technological trends that have lulled us into the false sense that we know more about the world around us than ever before.

Thoreau is far from my favorite American writer, and Walden is a book I have little desire to revisit.  But Thoreau, despite all of his second-rate Rousseauism, was on to something with his line about the telegraph.  The further removed any two people are from each other, by distance or affinity, the less likely it is that anything one may have to say to the other will be of any real importance.  As Thoreau continues,

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

Asynchronous communication is often a perfectly adequate vehicle for transmitting technical information.  But the kind of information that binds the generations, that perpetuates community, that builds up cultures and civilizations—those stories, sagas, and songs require conversation.  To some extent, that conversation can take place over the phone (audio or video), but the most faithful transmission takes place at sunrise in the local diner, or around the family dinner table on a Sunday afternoon, or on your front porch on a cicada-serenaded summer night.  Intonation, body language, the twinkle in the eye and the furrow in the brow—these may pass along more than the words that they accompany.

Such conversation is always local, even if the ostensible subject is ISIS and the Middle East or the umpteenth rehearsal of how Richard Nixon didn’t deserve his fate.  The message is the medium—the interaction, harsh yet gentle, frustrated yet patient, unyielding yet forgiving, between generations and friends and acquaintances and even the odd drifter passing through.

There is a group of men who sit at the same table at Nick’s Kitchen in downtown Huntington, Indiana, every morning from Monday through Saturday.  They would sit there on Sunday mornings, too, but the owner, JeanAnne Bailey, is a Methodist, and she observes the Lord’s Day.  Some of them have been there every morning for 30 years; others have come and gone, and younger ones have come and stayed.  They talk about everything, and about nothing; the table will fall silent for minutes at a time.  But just as on those still summer afternoons 40 years ago when I sat on the couch and read while Grandma tidied up the kitchen after lunch and Grandpa slept after a morning of working together in the garden and the yard, that silence speaks volumes about the ties that bind.

First published in the July 2018 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Can We Talk?

A few months after we moved to Huntington, Indiana, I was inducted into the Cosmopolitan Club, one of the country’s oldest extant discussion societies.  Chartered on January 18, 1894, the Cosmopolitan Club convenes on the fourth Tuesday of every month from September through May.  The membership is entirely male and capped at 25, and all members are required to attend each meeting, unless they have been excused in advance.

The format of the meetings is simple.  One member prepares and presents a paper on a topic of his choosing, and he selects another member to prepare and present a response.  (All of the papers are archived at the Huntington City-Township Library, and only a few from the end of the 19th century have been lost.)  After the paper and the response, each of the other members provides a short commentary of his own.  There are no refreshments, with two exceptions: Every member receives an apple as he leaves the September meeting; and the May meeting takes the form of a dinner, which wives are invited to attend.

The meetings are hosted at members’ houses, and the location rotates through the entire membership.  The preparation and presentation of papers, too, is on a strict rotation, starting with the most senior member and moving consecutively to the next in line.  When the club membership is at its maximum, a new member like myself may wait two years or more to deliver his first paper (though he may be called on at any time to prepare a response, as I was for the May meeting).  But from his first meeting, each member is a full and active participant, through his required short commentary on the paper and the response.

The membership is as diverse as you can get when drawing from the pool of males in a Midwestern town that is 96 percent white.  From civic leaders to businessmen to academics to blue-collar workers, the members are distinguished only by their seniority.  There are disagreements, but no arguments and no appeals to one’s own authority; meetings are, in millennial parlance, “safe spaces,” or, in the language of an earlier age, civilized conversations.

I have attended every meeting of the Cosmopolitan Club this year, with the exception of the one at which I was voted into membership.  The papers have spanned a variety of topics, but a common theme has emerged: the destruction of conversation in recent years, and the role that technology has played in that decline.

I have found little to disagree with in the musings of my fellow members, all of whom acknowledge the manifold blessings and the even greater curses that technology has visited upon 21st-century America.  The art of conversation is dying; the technology behind the social media that draws us closer, in some sense, to people across the country or around the world is isolating us from our own neighbors.

Of course, it is beyond trite these days to point out that the same was true of television and of radio.  Of the “communications technologies” of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, only the telephone may, on balance, have fostered community more than it destroyed it.  Yet the era of the telephone passed with the advent of the iPhone in 2007.  Since then, phones have been used less and less for voice communications and more and more for the asynchronous transfer of data.

But here we have put our finger on the problem: The “asynchronous transfer of data” is just a clinical way of saying “communication without conversation.”  And while the telephone does allow for conversation, even that conversation is stunted, because body language and the ability to interrupt without talking over your interlocutor are missing from conversations held on the phone.

True conversation is synchronous, a face-to-face dialogue, in a way that electronic communications can never really be.  (Even video calls today suffer from latency that changes the dynamic of a conversation in subtle but important ways.)  So why, even though we all carry around phones in our pockets, do we prefer asynchronous communication, to the point where coworkers are more likely to email or to use a chat program like Slack than to talk to one another face to face?

We can come up with dozens of excuses about the efficiency of asynchronous communications and the benefits of documenting discussions in text form, but the reality, it seems to me, is much simpler: We save conversation for matters of importance, and most of what we spend our time communicating these days is of little to no importance (though, as I will discuss next month, perhaps not for the reasons we might think).  And deep down, we recognize that reality, even as we prattle on about the Information Age and the ease of communications, and how lucky we are to live in a time when we can think of so little to say to our neighbor when we see him across the driveway, yet so much to tell our several thousand “friends” across the country and around the world who aren’t talking to their neighbors, either.

First published in the June 2018 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.