Life at the Edge of Reason

October 29, 2007 by Sanjay.

In my last note, I mentioned an eruption of anti-lawyer hysteria on the Cirrus Pilots forum. The arrival of the Fox Business Network channel has occasioned another logorrheic conflagration, this one covering the fairness and balance of mainstream American media, the global warming debate, and finally, Atheism and Christianity. What I find most interesting in such contentious online discussion threads (which tend to the complexity of a barroom brawl) is how much talking past each other we do today. It seems that we have neither the patience, nor the respect, to actually debate ideas. It’s much more satisfying to shout.

The problem is not limited to your average Joe Chatter. It seems to have taken on the form of a “best practice” for online interaction, even at high levels. Case in point: the jello-wrestling going on between Jim Fallows and someone called Gabriel Schoenfeld on their respective blogs. Jim Fallows writes for The Atlantic, a liberal monthly, and Gabriel Schoenfeld for the conservative Commentary. Here is how the match has unfolded to this point:

Move 1: Writing on the influence of lobbies in US policy-making, Fallows mentions three instances in which he believes national interests were sacrificed to a lobby’s narrow goals: the Armenian lobby’s manipulation of the Democrats into championing the recent anti-Turkish resolution, the anti-Castro lobby’s influence on the Cuba policy, and the pro-Israel lobby’s “legitimization” of the looming showdown with Iran.

Fallows is obviously critical of the distortional effects of AIPAC, a major pro-Israel lobby. But it’s clear from reading his short piece that his point is about the unintended consequences of the free market/winner takes all model of the American policy-making process.

Response: Quoting only the Fallows’ pro-Israel lobby example, Schoenfeld whips himself into righteous lather over the failure of “disloyal American” (and possible anti-semite) Fallows to acknowledge the terrible harm his own liberal peacenik lobby causes to American interests! While agreeing that monitoring factional forces is legitimate, the central query of Schoenfeld’s post is “why is this game played only one way, with America’s Jews the primary target?“

At no point in his blog post does Schoenfeld even hint at the fact that Fallows’ article was about lobbyist myopia, not a slam on Israeli interests. While some of the comments on the blog chorus Hallelujah!, most of the public commentators attack the tone and the content of Shoenfeld’s blogpost.

Counter: Fallows is (understandably) surprised at the Schoenfeld complaint, and wonders “which is the more plausible interpretation: That the author heard I’d written something objectionable and attacked it without reading it? Or that he did read it — and deliberately left out everything that didn’t fit his case, including through artful cutting of quotes?“

Fallows’ amazement is not hard to appreciate. Obviously, Schoenfeld has completely missed his point, which is not about Jews or Israel. And even if it had been targeted only at AIPAC, the leap to assuming anti-semitic motives is clearly absurd.

Last word: Schoenfeld has since issued a mea culpa saying that “I will cheerfully acknowledge that my conclusion was hasty”. But there’s little cheerful about the admission; rather, the appropriate word is churlish, since the blogpost is titled “The Disloyalty of James Fallows Revisited”. It also again questions Fallows’ motives, asking “why does he cast aspersions of disloyalty on those with whom he disagrees about what constitutes those interests?“

This is where matters stand as I type this. As with the Fox Business Network thread, what interests me most are not the specifics of the argument, but the nature of it. Schoenfeld, a well-known journo, and Fallows, another respected writer, are clearly talking past each other. Schoenfeld clearly made a mistake, reflexively attacking Fallows’ original post because he disagrees with his overall take on US-Israel relations (well-documented elsewhere), and perhaps a host of other issues viewed through the Liberal/Conservative schism in the American conversation. Of the two choices Fallows’ posed, I pick the third: Schoenfeld cannot read past Fallows’ criticism of AIPAC. It isn’t that he hasn’t read the words or that he maliciously filtered the part of the argument that didn’t fit his agenda. At a certain psychological, but nonetheless real, level, Schoenfeld just could not grok all of the original post because he was so offended by the anti-AIPAC bits.

The saddest aspect of this incident is that Schoenfeld is a paid, presumably trained, journalist. If a professional cannot be trusted to communicate, what hope is there for politicians or, for that matter, for us normal people?

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