Yesterday, I tweeted:
Get really mad. Together.
Twitter.
Ha ha I’m so witty. Anyway, it’s an expression of my feeling of alienation from the mob-attacks that pass for “debate” on Twitter and other online outlets. Last year I put it this way:
There is plenty of argument online. But actually relatively little open disagreement. [It’s] really just agreement on the position that those other people (or that one poor dumb bastard) on the other side are wrong.
It’s people, astride very tall horses, agreeing at other people.
At Big Think, Jason Gots traces this phenomenon to annoyance, the power that being irritated by a person or an idea can have on us emotionally. And where do we go to vent our emotions? Twitter! Gots writes:
Irritation is a powerful force. It has the whiff of righteousness.
Think about how you feel when (if) you’re annoyed at a smoker, or the way someone drives, or how they dress, or how they parent. Admit it, you feel bothered by their wrongness, that a moral principle has been broken. Ugh, look at that person just lighting up like it doesn’t even matter. Ugh, look at that mother letting her kid behave that way. Most of the time, these things don’t even effect you. You just feel like they’ve violated something sacred rule even though it has nothing to do with you.
More Gots:
[Irritation] inspires dread in the meek. If you read old accounts of any society that eventually erupted in some form of ethnic cleansing or witch-hunting, you’ll hear people gossiping and commiserating about the annoying habits of the marginalized group, nodding their heads in agreement about the ways in which these people obviously don’t “get” the rules of society that are perfectly obvious to anyone with common sense.
Have you ever known that a romantic relationship was more or less over, as far as you were concerned, but couldn’t really justify a breakup with any ironclad offenses? They haven’t wronged you or cheated on you, you’re just done. So (and I know I’ve done this in my stupider days) you unconsciously begin to invent things that bother you about them, or the small annoyances that never mattered before suddenly become deal-breakers. Now apply that to one cultural, ethnic, political, religious, or any other identity group’s feelings toward another. (Android people can’t stand how snooty Apple people are. Apple people can’t stand how crass and tasteless Android people are. They are so annoying.)
Gots doesn’t just shrug it off, though. He wants us to stop it. And it’s harder than it seems to stop.
Words have power, and the line between opinion and fact is not nearly so clearly demarcated as it once was. So when your rhetoric suggests that something you’re saying should be completely obvious to anyone who isn’t an idiot, you’re basically bullying people into agreeing with you.
Remember bullies in the classic middle and high school sense? Well I sure do! And they were always so annoyed by my existence. The fact that I was, well, the way I was, way over there, away from them, really irritated them. That feeling justified their ruining several years of my life. What I looked like, what I was into, the way I stood or sat or walked, it wasn’t right, so I had it coming.
This happens all the easier if you, the hearer of a given annoyance, don’t know any better. If I’m an Apple fan, and I hear all this irritation with Android people, I’ll be pretty likely to share that opinion and that annoyance, even if I have no experience with Android or its users. If I know nothing about feminism, and a bunch of dudebros I follow go on about how annoying they are, what with their always asking for equality and whatnot, I will likely share this opinion of them whether I intend to or not.
Because you see I probably don’t know any better, and I certainly don’t want to be on the outs of my group, right? I can’t be sticking up for Android or feminism or whatever, because then I’m the one my group gets annoyed at. Then it’s open season on me.
Oh hey, it’s open season on Rachel Dolezal, isn’t it? We’re so annoyed and irritated that she thought it would be okay to just pretend to be black. She’s fair game. It doesn’t matter that we don’t know why she does it, or what might have happened to her, or been done to her, to make her want to escape her identity, to turn away from her other life. Let’s make her feel even worse because we’re annoyed.
Arthur Cohen had an op-ed in the Times a few days ago about political hating, but it applies to all of these things. His advice:
Declare your independence by not consuming, celebrating or sharing the overheated outrage and negative punditry — even if it comes from those with whom you agree. Avoid indulging in snarky, contemptuous dismissals of Americans on the other side. And always own up to your views.
Imagine that.
pav alexander 