Ideological Regurgitation in Media: A Cyclical Clusterfuck

(Note: I originally intended to post a piece I've been thinking about for some time entitled “The Mere Exposure Effect and Dialectical Stasis.” The connection between the two halves of the title is motivated by a Slate article that demonstrates how rampant the sharing of articles is on social media when most people haven't bothered finishing the fucking thing, which results in a malformed dialectic climate in a perpetual state of wailing, adirectional infancy. I posit a visual-linguistic form of the Mere Exposure Effect where people are likely to agree and exalt an article based on a headline, a photo, and perhaps the first couple sentences. Toss in some bashing of the reductive Dialectics of Hegel, Marx, praise Ray Brassier and Francois Laruelle's notion of non-philosophy as a meta-philosophical antidote to the absolutism of systematic thinking and speaking, how even those privy to such shit are complacent in their role in such shit, and there ya go.

However, I see that thing being fairly long. I'm notoriously awful about attaining the proper amount of motivation and sobriety to even begin formally writing something, so expect that one in a decade or so. The following is essentially a reinforcement of the aforementioned piece's thesis.)

I'd like to faux-reminisce about the good old days when open conversation was a legitimate, breathing thing that anyone could partake in, but that would simply be an act of our favorite pastime: Romanticized historical revisionism. The totality of human interaction has more or less been a long, violent volleyball match with teams made up of diametrically opposed ideologies lobbing their respective preternatural, unwavering answers to the world back and forth at one another. Occasionally we get legitimate heroes like de Sade, Lord Byron, Nietzsche, Hunter S. Thompson, and the like (all white men, mind you. This is not accidental. It's a manifestation of a calculated, architecturally astute system of oppression that still persists); social and intellectual libertines in the purest sense that pointedly do not give a fuck, but they all get locked up, go insane, or are denigrated for their atavistic behavior.

No, productive discourse, in its truest sense, has always been something of a perverse fable. This fact is only so egregious in our present day because we live in a society where you can't legally buy another person or beat your wife for overcooking dinner. We're supposed to be a post-racial, post-gender, post-everything society in spite of the fact that minorities are targeted and subjugated on an institutional level and sexual assault is a legitimate epidemic whose transgressors largely walk free without being reprimanded. You know that thing where someone is regaling you with a tale about their last bout with explosive diarrhea, and you stick your fingers in your ears and wail “LA LA LA LA” to block the unpleasant words? Yeah, our current method of attempting to ascertain why things are so fucked up in spite of the fact that we're so goshdarn'd smart. 

The Right and the Left are equally guilty of this infantile approach to discussing eminent issues. The former generally wants everyone other than a select, highly inclusive club, a club they're certainly card-carrying members of, to be absolutely miserable, while the latter generally pleads for a sanitized arena of existential play where nobody gets picked last, and unfettered egalitarianism reigns supreme. It's a fascinating relationship of inverse utopia/dystopia, where whether it's a good or bad place to be is contingent upon what side you're rooting for. I would say that the one thing they have in common is that you'd have to be a true-tested fucking moron to believe either are tenable prospects for our near future; but sadly, I see the Conservative/Libertarian dream police state being far more likely than the Left's shiny Ebony and Ivory heaven, given the way things continue to play out.

The Left really does have its heart in the right place. As much of a misanthropic, moral anti-realist, nihilist as I am, I really do think it would be quite neat if we lived in a world where no single person was ever subjugated on an institutional level. It's just not going to fucking happen. Don't take this as me endorsing apathy toward social issues. Call people out on their bullshit, go protest, fuck shit up. I sincerely mean that. Lord knows I'm too much of a pussy to do so, and somebody has to do it. Just be realistic and remain cognizant that things are irreparably fucked. We're basically just doing damage control by saving whatever passengers we can from the half-submerged Titanic.

I'll just come out and bring up the matter that motivated my spontaneous decision to pen this brief post. The decision to make this story the main focus was a purely arbitrary one. You can literally pick any story of the week that is politically divisive, and the futile Ouroboros-like schematic of non-dissemination will almost certainly still apply.

A couple of weeks ago, four students at Columbia University posted an op-ed concerning a forum hosted by the Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board, where a student, herself a survivor of sexual assault, recounted being triggered by sections of Ovid's Metamorphoses that contain depictions of rape and sexual assault. Unlike every other article I've seen selectively picking apart this piece, I'll forgo extensively quoting it and just assume you know how to read. The gist of it is that such Core classes (classes all students must take and pass in order to graduate) often contain sensitive material that could psychologically trigger a myriad of different students of various cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, and that the university should work toward facilitating various means to alert students of potentially upsetting material via trigger warnings and different programs where professors and students coordinate ways to curtail disturbing in-class experiences.

I must be fucking crazy, because my first reaction wasn't abject outrage at the supposed banality of their requests. The only things they're guilty of are naïve idealism and the charge toward making everything ever a matter of identity politics, where there is no barometer regarding the severity of the transgression against the victim. Regarding the naïve idealism, that's been covered. We're all fucked and if things get better, it will only be on an infinitesimally small scale over a long period of time. Regarding the omnipresence of identity politics as the sole recourse to discussion of social maladies in popular Left politics, that's tougher.

This recourse is inherently self-defeating, simply because it outright refuses to engage in legitimate discourse with the enemy, and refuses to acknowledge that what each individual is going through is symptomatic of a systemic network of plagues that has no clear way of being sorted out. On a purely semantic level, it (perhaps unintentionally) equivocates all forms of assault onto one level playing field. Open discussion is the stuff of fantasy, as there is no way of openly discoursing without potentially offending somebody's sensibilities and putting your professional position in jeopardy.

I'm not trying to marginalize these people. Again, they have their hearts in the right place. All victims are singular. You cannot quantify trauma, and the mere suggestion of doing so is pretty offensive and shitty to me. The closest we can ever come to understanding what an individual victim experiences when triggered is approximation due to this very fact. Fellow victims can surely reveal details of their attacks in whatever capacity they feel to know they're not alone, but each individual person, and those individuals alone, can truly know how deeply the said attack infiltrates their daily lives.

However, the omnipresence of identity politics as the preferred lingua franca of intellectual discourse in the humanities will get us nowhere. It's eternal regurgitation of a closed ideology that simply isn't compatible with the shitty world we live in. As for an alternative solution? Beats me. I'm pretty sure there isn't a “take as needed for pain” pill for this shit.

Looking back at what I just wrote, I do feel like I was a bit harsh. My take was generous compared to the two big pieces I could find about this matter.

One piece comes from Reason.com, the digital outlet for Reason Magazine. There's little to say about the article given how vacuous it is. The last four paragraphs are the only ones containing anything that you could arguably consider content, and the same misreading of the situation is repeated twice in a span of less than two paragraphs:

“But the fact that an occasional student might feel uncomfortable with certain material seems a strange reason to think no one should read and discuss it.”

That would be nice if the op-ed said anything to that effect. Seriously. Nowhere in the piece by the Columbia 4 did they ever say anything about removing Ovid from the Core curriculum. They merely called for an impossibly idyllic system that caters to the need of each individual student. Literally two fucking paragraphs later:

“But that's what that level of reaction represents: psychological trauma. Which, while something professors should be sensitive to, shouldn't dictate the parameters of acceptable education for all students.”

Jesus motherfucking Christ. Does what I wrote near the beginning of this shit make any more sense now? This can't even be called a conversation. It's a repetition of self-appointed truisms thrown out to any given audience that is going to nod its head in approval of the message they were already convinced of. The author makes a single good point in remarking on the seemingly hyperbolic language the student used, but then proceeds to just tell her to go see a therapist instead of actually, you know, thinking about the issue.

Even more bewildering is this piece, by what I initially assumed was just some guy in sweatpants writing from a basement. Turns out it was written by Jerry Coyne, who is some kind of well-known biologist and proponent for public scientific literacy. He begins by ham-fistedly maligning the proliferation of trigger warnings and likens it to a suppression of free speech. I need a drink just from the intellectual laziness of that nonexistent connection. Then he quotes part of the op-ed. Then he imposes his own diagnosis on the student, just like the Reason writer, by suggesting she go see a therapist instead of complain about being triggered in the classroom. He then proceeds to mention that if we continue this process of implementing trigger warnings ad infinitum, literally everything ever will have some kind of trigger warning. Hope you have a loaded bong nearby for that deep knowledge droppin'.

Here's the really interesting part that truly drives home what I've been trying to say this entire time. He, a culturally Jewish man, has read numerous Nazi Germany-era texts, visited Auschwitz, and has seen movies like Triumph of the Will. They all saddened him, but he learned something about the world as a result, so these women should confront uncomfortable things to become more studious individuals.

There is something resembling a very good point resting in there. A point that could only be ascertained if we didn't exist in a climate of discursive stasis. As I said before, quantification of trauma and knowing precisely how things deep-seeded in the psyche of a person will affect them is fucking impossible. At best, we can simply have conversations with one another while attempting to set our preconceived ideology to the side and attempt to make some goddamn progress. The odds of that happening are about as slim as the odds of this 12-pack lasting me until midnight.

Let me just venture a guess at how this will play out in real life, given how little things tend to change. The social justice types will continue to write op-ed pieces like the Columbia one directed at essentially nobody but themselves, and the rest of the academic Left will continue publishing articles like the previous two I linked. The Right, umm. I highly doubt a low-key story like this will reach any large outlets, but they'd probably bemoan the Liberalization of universities and use it as an example of why we should keep extracting funds from Humanities departments so we can blow up more brown people overseas. Never shall their discursive paths cross.

Coyne stupidly ends his article with advice that essentially tells victims to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, because life itself is triggering. Seems odd, given what a boner the popular American Left has for increasing awareness about the pangs of clinical depression ever since a few celebrities mentioned they had it, Coyne himself even wrote an article criticizing evolutionary psychologists' attempts to explain depression as an adaptive trait. He then goes on to implicitly equivocate the not-at-all prevalent societal mistrust of atheists and a Patriarchal society's systematic mistreatment of women. Well done, dipshit.

Not that any of this matters. We'll all forget about it in a week or two and move on to talking to ourselves about whatever topic outrages us at that given point in time.