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John B's avatar

It has been a while since I read either the Cancelling of the American Mind or the Coddling of the American Mind, so the idea I am trying to articulate may have been covered in one of these two books, and I have simply forgotten it.

My understanding of the concept of rhetorical fortress is that we can label other people as being “right wing” or “socialist” or something else, and safely ignore anything they have to say.  In a sense, it is a group form of ad hominem attack.

I see one other phenomenon that I think is also a significant factor in how we view people and news sources, and it comes at bias from the opposite direction.  It is survivor bias or what is not there.

Historically I had been liberal in orientation.   I am college educated, live in a large city, am not religious, and have an upper middleclass income.   My (previous) orientation is predictable.  I graduated from college in the early 1980s.

A few years ago, my youngest son came home from college (Madison WI) complaining how woke his collage was.  Every topic was a land mine. Woke?  Really?  My experience was college was a bastion of free speech.  What are you talking about kid?  Yea, I know college is a little on the liberal side, and Madison more than others, but come on….

A couple things happened to change my view.  I retired and had more time to read, and I chose to read broadly.  I happened to read the Coddling of the American Mind, many of Thomas Sowell’s books, and Abigail Shirer’s book “Irreversible Damage” among dozens of other books.  The picture I got from these sources was different, and more in line with what my son was seeing.

Recently I was talking with several friends about political topics and new sources, and I told them I was far more skeptical now about news sources than I had been in the past.  It should have been evident to them, if they were listening, that my previously more liberal views, had changed.   They told me that both left leaning and right leaning news sources had some slant, but the right leaning sources were significantly more misleading than left leaning sources.   Left leaning news sources were much more honest.  They told me that the New York Times, certainly had a liberal opinion page, but the news pages themselves just told the news, no spin.  

In some respects, the New York Times does just tell the news, but its political bias is visible if you are looking at both what is there, and what is not there.  Part of their bias is what they choose to cover or not cover, and if they do cover a topic, how often.   Part of their bias it is what is missing or not emphasized.   If you watch Ben Shapiro, he talks about some of the obvious (at least to me) cognitive decline of Joe Biden.  I don’t recall the New York Times spending much time pointing this out. 

If I had a wall in my house that was 50% red and 50% green, but if I wrote endless stories about the red side of the wall, you might easily assume that the wall was mostly or all red.  I would not be lying about the color of the wall, but I would be allowing you to draw the wrong conclusions.

I see this emphasis, or lack of emphasis, playing out in the war in Gaza.   Many liberal news sources talk about the deaths happening in Gaza, but don’t talk about some/many of those deaths being Hamas fighters or caused by Hamas.   They don’t talk about the terrible things Hamas did on October 7th.   They don’t go into any of the history Israel has with its less than friendly neighbors and the stated objectives of Hamas and Iran, i.e. the end of Israel as a state, and the death or removal of all Jews from the area.  They allow you to believe that all Hamas wants is to live freely in peace.   My friends told me that the tunnels that Hamas had built were there to allow them to sneak food into Gaza from outside sources. This was done because Israel was starving them. Hamas may in fact be moving some food or other supplies around via the tunnels, but the tunnels are really about smuggling weapons into Gaza.  Wherever they are getting their news from, it is failing to paint even a remotely accurate picture.

So my friends, and probably me, are dismissing sources because of some rhetorical fortress but we are also failing to be critical at all of the sources or tribe we do listen to.

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Laura Creighton's avatar

There is another aspect to all of this, both on the left and the right, where the position is 'I don't have to have a proposal about how to address this problem. All I have is my feelings.' Most practical politics, of course, start there and getting together a group of people who are unhappy about problem X is a good first step towards creating a policy for fixing it. The problem is that a great deal of worthless communication goes on where all that is communicated is 'I feel bad' and 'you people are to blame'.

As a practical matter, this means when it comes to discussion and debate it is always a good idea for the people who would like to solve problems to expel the people who just want to wallow in their outrage and hurt feelings. But neither the left nor the right are interested in this message. They both send the people with the right kind of 'lived experience' or 'traditional values' to prevent anybody from considering that the other side might have a few good ideas or made some good points in this disagreement.

If you get to design any more debates, can you try:

Resolved: Your feelings are not you. They are the buttons other people use to manipulate you.

I think that we will need to detach people from their identification with their own feelings before we can make a lot of progress on this front, but I don't think that anybody is interested in this aside from those few who are trying to find meaning in Stoicism and certain forms of Buddhism.

Giving up a life centred on your own feelings appears to be a hard sell.

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