My friend Jack linked to an article titled Our National Altamont is Just a Shot Away. It’s an short article that mourns the fact that civility and courtesy are in short supply.
What happened to courtesy?
The article gives many examples of courtesy-gone-missing. The analogy between the Stone’s concert at Altamont and current public discourse and behavior is reasonable and the implication is grim: all that is left to complete the analogy is for somebody to be shot.
Of course, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and the rest of the conservative talk-radio crew top the list of the rude and discourteous. This is true to the point where they have spawned a cottage industry that documents the ways that they contradict themselves, misstate facts (i.e. lie) and make an ass of themselves in public.
They are experts in getting attention by being loud and rude. They keep attention by turning a complicated world into black-and-white…meaning you either love them or hate them…and either way, you either watch them to hear what they say or watch the websites that want to discredit what they say.
And that’s where courtesy went – it was simplified out of existence by the loud and stupid.
(That’s probably a truism, isn’t it?)
Cosmopolitanism
I wrote about cosmopolitanism a few years ago, but I think that post is just as good now as it was then. The quote from Appiah in his interview is especially important:
“Cosmopolitanism for me has two strands, one is that you have to take seriously the idea that we’re collectively responsible all of us for the fate of all of us. And the other is respect that the choices that people make can be different from one another.”
In the book, which I’ve read a few times since I wrote that post in 2006, Appiah talks about how we can better understand our own values and beliefs by encountering people who have different (and often incompatible) values and beliefs. To Appiah, “Value” (in the sense of “morals” or “values” or “virtues”) is created and strengthened through conversation.
I agree. The problem is that you can’t have a conversation when (a) you are yelling “YOU ARE WRONG!” at the other person and (b) you see the world in black-and-white, absolute terms. There’s no way to find middle ground, much less a better way to do things (that, perhaps, neither side can see alone).
So yeah…It’s too bad that we don’t seem to have much conversation happening on talk radio, cable television or even in the “impartial reporting” we get in the newspapers.
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