I keep thinking that I have something to write about.  It keeps being wrong.  I get most of the way through something, or maybe even just started on it, and ask myself, “what do I have to say that hasn’t already been said to death?  Why would anyone want to read it anyway?”

These questions kill a lot of my output.  Really, the number of things I can call myself an authority on is shockingly small.  There’s a slightly less shockingly small number of things that I could say I’m decently well versed with, but I have a really hard time getting pedagogical on topics where I assume my readership—and I know all four of you—are as well versed as I am.

There was a time when I thought it’d be neat to be one of the thought leaders of the blogosphere, or at least an occasionally recognized contributor.  A B-list blogger.  Even C-list, maybe.  I was never thinking that I would make a living of it, but the thought of having some form of meaningful discussion was pretty exciting.  But I’ve slowly started noticing that there is no meaningful discussion, at all.

First of all, everyone really loves their ideas.  Libertarians, commies, free-marketeers, yogis, christians and other frightened masses: they all have their own ideas about how the world works, or how it ought to work, and they all have a sort of logic to them.  But they also have a big steaming lump of problems; issues that they ignore or assume would go away if their idea had its day in the sun.  As a result, most of the discussion I see involves chewing the news from different ideological standpoints or straight up preaching, and it’s very rare that something shockingly insightful comes out of the whole mess.

I’m also starting to think that a lot of the discussions are about issues that it doesn’t make sense for me to form an opinion on.  The last time I blogged was about the upcoming depression, and that news hasn’t really affected me yet.  I suppose people who put a lot of faith into “the economy” and “growth” and stuff are feeling it.  I’m sure we all have an opinion about the kerfuffle in Gaza, but how many of you has it directly affected?  I’m going to guess that among the people who read this, the closest it will come will be having a friend who has family in some other part of the region.

This is actually bringing me to a point.  I have an opinion on the events in Gaza: it’s none of my business.  I can’t take sides, because for the life of me, I can’t understand what motivates these people.  The history of the conflict is so full of savagery from both sides and so steeped in the arrogance of colonial Europe that I’d rather just leave it alone.  I do believe that the US should be acting as a peacekeeper instead of backing Israel, and that will probably happen now that Bush is out, but I’m not going to say either side is bad or good or better or worse because the issue is too complex for that kind of reductionism.

The modern world is full of examples where serious harm has been done because people who believed they were right stepped into something that was none of their business.  The imperial quest to “bring civilization to the savages.”  Every ostensibly religious war.  Banning drugs whose consumption doesn’t violate the peace (and oddly having no trouble with some that do).  Abstinence-only sex propaganda.  The list goes on.

I don’t know if there’s an evolutionary basis for not believing other people can form coherent worldviews and make sensible decisions based on them, but it seems to be endemic.  We have an almost striking inability to appreciate the subtleties of each other’s viewpoints, and we make strawmen of them just like we reduce everyone outside of our monkeysphere to a stereotype.  In fact, I would guess that the number of viewpoints we can appreciate in a detailed way¹ is considerably smaller than Dunbar’s number.  I’m going to guess it’s less than five.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it was usually one, sometimes perhaps even zero.  I can imagine tribes of apes having a dispute and forming shrieking, chest-thumping groups to intimidate the others into submission.  For some reason, it feels like our current discursive tools are the abstract descendants of this.

Now, if all of our discussions are boiling down to ideological chest-thumping, I’d rather opt out.  There are much more interesting things to do.

1) Let’s call this Reid’s Number.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Politics, Smart-Sounding Babble, Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.