Respecting complexity

Editorial

Had Marshall McLuhan been able to foresee the 24/7 news cycle, he might have anticipated a population more deeply and broadly engaged in their society’s life. With endless news on television and infinite information available on the Internet, there should have been a new renaissance of complex understanding and nuanced discussion of important topics. What happened?

To a large extent, the quest for viewer ratings, and accompanying advertising dollars, has trumped both civil discourse and intelligent debate. The need for ratings has led to ever-lower levels of discourse, in which competing hosts try to attract and keep viewers with a continous circus of shouting, flashy graphics and incendiary bumper-sticker sloganeering. The 24/7 news era, which might have been expected to usher in a new era of long-form documentary and current affairs programming, instead seems to have created the opposite: an insatiable appetite for the next exciting thing, ceaseless channel-surfing and ever-decreasing spans of attention.

Similarly, the Internet, with its instantaneous access to almost any information available, could have led to deeper understanding and more informed dialogue. Instead, the self-selecting nature of the Internet, in which people can find multiple information sources that reflect their pre-existing prejudices and tastes, seems to have exacerbated ideological polarization. Many people use the Web as a defensive shield: to find material that supports their beliefs, rather than new information that might challenge them.

These factors are part of the reason that American politics in particular is arguably at its most polarized point in history. (Canada’s four-party Parliament has helped prevent some of the polarization we see in two-party America, if only because we are too divided to be merely polarized, which is a double-edged sword worthy of discussion another time.) Combining these media realities with decades of partisan gerrymandering brings the current American political conflict to the crisis point. As congressional districts have been manipulated to become increasingly safe for incumbents, elections have been reduced to an ever-shrinking number of seats that are actually in play. What this means is that the real selection of Congress members happens in the party primaries, which tend to be tilted toward ideological extremes, so safe Republican seats get increasingly right-wing candidates and Democratic seats ever more leftist representatives.

But then something comes along to shake up even the labels that define this polarization. Whether political expediency (Bill Clinton declaring “The era of big government is over”) or abdication of ideology for profligacy (the fiscally conservative Ronald Reagan ringing up the biggest debt in American history), at some point, names cease to be helpful in describing people and movements.

At its most appalling, this failure of labels was demonstrated by Jared Loughner, the 22-year-old suspect in the mass shooting in Tucson two weeks ago that took six lives and has left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others fighting for theirs in hospital. Of course, in this case, all sides naturally seek to depict Loughner as not one of their own. While mental illness seems undoubtedly to have played the major role in this incident, politics played a role too. Reviewing the rantings and influences of Lough-ner’s online posts, videos and handwritten notes, the New York Times, among others, have reconstructed a disturbed young man who selected randomly from the ideological smorgasbord of extremes, both of the far-left and the far-right (he cited both the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf as favorite reads and his opinions seem to borrow freely from both extremes).

While Loughner may not be the finest example to illustrate the point, he is clearly unable to be pigeon-holed ideologically. This is true of most people. While media may be oversimplifying complexity, human beings, especially intelligent ones, cannot so simply be categorized. On a global scale, the shift of Zionist support from the left, in the 1950s and ’60s, to the right today, reflects a repositioning that starts to nullify labels. Conservative John A. MacDonald promised “no truck nor trade with the Yankees.” Conservative Brian Mulroney brought us the North American Free Trade Agreement. Trade unionists, who once railed against artificial barriers between workers, now wave nationalist flags to save their domestic jobs from overseas workers. Increasingly, the words left and right not only oversimplify people and positions, they misrepresent them.

Everybody is composed of positive and negative characteristics, of conflicting opinions and contradictory behaviors. In the course of human activity, this complexity is exponentially more refracted, as the views of millions come into contact in the marketplace of ideas. We would be profoundly foolish to pretend that people and ideas can be so easily categorized.

Complexity is humankind’s great gift. It might make reporting more difficult and snap judgments less practical. But recognizing and respecting complexity is necessary for understanding each other and our society. This, too, is one of the important lessons of recent events.

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