We are really in trouble folks
I haven’t thought much about Joe Rogan really ever, but yesterday I was in a conversation about the Neil Young – Spotify – Rogan situation and I was pretty amazed at the starting point for the conversation: Censorship is bad. I see the situation as more evidence that we are incapable of having any sort of dissent or weird opinion in the world because we are incapable of recognizing what traditionally holds an argument together.
Neil Young is also incapable of recognizing this. He, like so many of us these days, is taking the Supreme Court’s language from the Citizens United v. FEC case, where they said “consider money as speech and protect it as such.” Young, and many of us have taken that not as a metaphor, and believe money to be beyond speech, it is beyond persuasion, it is beyond argument – it might even be more powerful than the all-knowing fact!
I often wonder about the question, “What does good open debate look like?” I don’t ask this because I think that we are walking by it; I really don’t think anyone can answer this question in a productive way. People will most likely say something like “lots of facts” or “where we have civility” but these are preferences, not a modality or a model for what a good open debate would be.
Answering this question is both helpful and depressing to see how poor our rhetorical education is, and how many of us believe that if we just read the “right information” we don’t have to worry about things like style, organization, or reaching people different than us. Information will transcend our differences and make everything just fine. Of course when this doesn’t work, most of these information peddlers just switch to a rhetoric based on “how incredibly stupid people are.” This is Perelman and Olbrects/Tyteca’s warning that you cannot dismiss recalcitrant audience members when offering an argument to the point where offering the argument would seem ridiculous, i.e. there’s nobody left.
This is what we do – we offer information that convinced us to others who are different than we are without consideration for that difference. Even in the era of diversity and inclusion everywhere you turn, we treat those concepts to as “facts beyond argument” and impose them on others without consideration of how to make it palatable, how to alter it to their perspective to get the largest chance of buy-in, or other such approach.
Rhetoric’s starting point is the lack of common ground from which to attempt to convince others to see things our way. It was the first step. Today people believe this to be the ultimate problem, the final boss, the thing that is holding back the power of facts. They blame the mass media, or social media, or what have you for creating the lack of common ground. But this has always been an issue, or else the ancient teachers of rhetoric were making stuff up and lying well beyond what Plato thought them capable of.
The Joe Rogan controversy is embarrassing, as it’s yet another index to measure how incredibly bad we are at dealing with and expressing opinion. There’s no shortage of people like Rogan. He just happens to make millions off of his flailing. It’s only dangerous because we don’t know how to handle opinions. Neil Young’s actions further harm us by showing that we must wait for those who are powerful and wealthy to act in the right ways in order to overcome information we don’t think should be out there. The idea that offering minority opinion as a form of entertainment and rock stars boycotting services where they can be heard are our forms of public deliberation should make us all profoundly sad. Our ways out, such as deplatforming, or using profit margins to end particular kinds of speech, are carrying us further into the prison that we think they are springing us from.
Public deliberation doesn’t happen in these vast mega-arenas. The public, the shape of it, and the shape of deliberation is constituted at the moment when you choose – and how you choose – to engage the people you know about issues that matter to you. You know so much about these people. Creating common ground should be easy. It should be something that you can easily create with shared memories, values, and preferences. From there, the argument is crafted. But most of us reach for facts and start there. Facts, as any public speaking or composition textbook will tell you, are supporting materials for an argument that further supports a thesis. It’s not the argument, it’s a part of it. Our temptation with facts is to hand someone car keys and then be frustrated when they ask where it’s parked, what color it is, what model, whether it has a manual transmission, and where we’d like them to drive it.
The rhetorical response to Rogan, Young, and the countless other controversies like this is to ask a question: “Is this good, open public debate?” Constructing your reasons why, and constructing them for the audience you imagine you want to address, will tell you a lot. If you sit there, unable to move past the idea that “he’s an idiot,” or “he doesn’t believe the facts,” you’ll start to get a sense of just how much trouble we are in. Without being able to constitute one another as audiences, without the practice of determining a starting place, we are indeed facing down the terror of the loss of democracy, however you define it – unless you think democracy is bickering with friends over whether wealthy celebrity X should remove their content from a platform to stand up for what’s right.