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is the idea here to point to a kind of cognitive dissonance? from many viewpoints, the present is a collection of unfolding disasters--but there are also viewpoints that do not see the same information in the same terms at all. from the former viewpoint--if you accept it as absolute (which is a problem if you really want a debate), the most reasonable explanation for the latter is cognitive dissonance--and inability to collect and organize the pertinent data in a rational way. from the latter viewpoint, i expect that things look very different, that there may be very different ways of--say--establishing relevance between variables, giving weight to them, differences in narrative (obviously) motivated by a different set of intellectual and affective committments.
in other words, this is a classical ideological problem.
when i started playing at tfp in politics, roachboy was a kind of observer in a way, trying to work out the extent to which the committments and/or positions of individuals, particularly from the right, were just extensions of an overarching conservative ideology. while i found that to be variably the case, the one nut i never cracked was how to move from seeing these politics through this lens analytically and being able to generate a debate about it. in a sense, i was asking for a meta-debate. folk (left and right) who hold tightly to an ideological frame that they take over from the outside world, that they inhabit as given, tend not to be able to simultaneously think through a frame and talk about the frame.
the other thing i figured out is that it's nonetheless possible to get something like a meta-debate, but it's all about the framing of questions.
you can't lead with something overly inflammatory if you actually want a debate about this. you just can't. it won't work, it never works--you know this, i know this, most of our more conservative comrades know this as well. an inflammatory opening is not really "why do you think x?"--it's "why are you so fucking stupid?"
so if my experience is any guide, you can do what i think you're trying to do, but you have to be careful about exactly how you frame the question you ask and you need to adopt a position of observer actually interested in how folk think, even as (given the nature of the board, how small and self-enclosed the community in politics is at this point) the latitude that, say, you or i might have to actually manage to get that sort of discussion is pretty limited, simply because we--like most everyone else here--have histories here.
i'm not saying don't try this--but maybe figure a different relation to what you're asking--not a different angle on the same basic thing.
of course, this post probably makes all such movement impossible.
but there we are.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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