Firestarter
The problems afflicting us are hard enough to manage on their own. Bad faith actors, ideology and lazy thinking are making the situation impossible.
Politicians lie. Corporations steal. The news media propagandize.
In a very general sense, we know these things to be true. But not everything politicians say is a lie. Corporations aren’t always stealing. Mainstream news media often report truthfully and in good faith.
The disinclination or inability to make distinctions of this sort, to separate the generally (or at least occasionally) true from the specifically false, is a defining trait of ideologues, conspiracy theorists and lazy thinkers in general. People who fall into these categories might cling to a kernel of truth but often lack the discipline, rigour, and/or intention to in every instance move beyond this when reasoning out conclusions and parsing fact from fiction in specific cases. While more critical thinkers go through the often unconscious work of judging based on solid logic, common sense, and trustworthy information, the messy cohort alluded to will (in an equally unconscious manner) mould and massage new information into pre-existing storylines or ideologies about the world, their instincts and feelings seemingly taken as all the evidence needed.
The reader may be familiar with more examples of the sort of faulty, irresponsible, even dangerous reasoning this category of “thinker” can conjure up. Amidst this summer’s devastating wildfire season in Europe and North America, the destruction of Lahaina in Maui sparked rampant speculation online that global elites connected to the World Economic Forum and/or the United Nations had deliberately set the fires in order to facilitate the island of Maui’s transformation to a “smart city” or “15-minute city.” The proof given was predictably feeble: a claim that this past January a conference had been held on the island focusing on exactly that goal. But even if turning Maui into a “smart island” had been the specific focus of the conference (which it wasn’t), correlation does not imply causation. Just because one thing happened and then later in the year something else happened doesn’t mean they are connected.
Last month I wrote about the overheated rhetoric surrounding sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) in education. One particularly exaggerated story which has come to be connected with this, of a student thinking him or herself a cat, and school administration apparently indulging this fancy with kitty litter and drink bowl, was a straw man trotted out regularly by TV personalities such as Piers Morgan and many angry, misguided parents at school board meetings. A story which might have resembled the true recounting of some troubled child or two’s encounter with a coddling administration suddenly was projected to an outsized prominence in the overall argument, as if defenders of SOGI education in schools were prepared to die on the hill of feline identity rights. This has served to muddy the waters as reasonable people paying attention without knowing the issue intimately think, “Well I’m against that.”
To add onto this, Hamas’ barbaric attacks of October 7th on Israel near the border with Gaza, and Israel’s continuing brutal response give us an example of the frantic, messy merging of events into calcified narratives, all playing out in real time. In the aftermath of the explosion at the Al Alhi Hospital in Gaza on October 17th, bad faith actors and emotional audiences with no desire to alter pre-packaged storylines and pre-formed understandings plunged forward with accusations of Israeli responsibility, uninterested in waiting for evidence. Consumers around the world eagerly gobbled up misinformation (in the form of old videos, fake social media posts, etc), having already made up their minds based on the baggage of beliefs already carried.
The three prior paragraphs run through just three examples of a litany of exaggerations and outright falsehoods popping up and floating on in cyberspace and the real world. No problem, you might say: Let those less rigorous thinkers among us have their fun. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. The majority of the voting public being able to think through this armada of sophistries, lies and delusions is vital to democratic society because government is formed and (in a less obvious way) carried out through their collective judgement in the real world. Democracy depends on an educated and sufficiently informed citizenry making wise judgments when necessary, whether at the ballot box or through polling and political pressure. These societies guarantee freedom of speech to the people, but citizens must be able to discern between the pertinent and gibberish, and reward politicians who also do this.
In our present information age these central responsibilities of the democratic citizen to form opinions and judgments and make them known should have been made easier, but things haven’t quite panned out that way. In a manner similar to how the printing press multiplied the available versions of disseminated truth, with massive societal repercussions ranging from the Protestant Reformation to the rise of the nation state, our ongoing digital information revolution has given every schmuck with an internet connection a soapbox, or in the parlance of the more optimistic among us, “democratized information.” This has multiplied exponentially the strength and reach of disparate voices to a level dwarfing what was experienced in the 16th and 17th centuries.
In those days, a complacent Catholic Church found itself besieged by the first serious opposition it had faced in ages, leading in its complex way to the gruesome monstrosity of the Thirty Years War in Europe, among other horrors. In 2023, a mere three decades into the launch of the internet age, we once again find the authority of the state and the legitimacy of our legacy institutions coming under attack, and social cohesion beginning to tear. The coronavirus pandemic presented this to us in its most dramatic form, but we also were gifted the pre-covid rise of Trump (in no small part through Twitter), as well as the more recent hyperventilations outlined above.
When I worked in Shanghai from 2010 to 2014, I found a common rationale put forward by local Chinese when justifying limits to free speech set by the party was that the population was not ready for the freedoms we enjoyed in the West. China had evolved so dramatically over such a short period of time that ensuring uniform development of standards across the whole country (for example in education) had proven impossible. As such, much of the population, especially online, remained susceptible to “bad elements.” The government had to hold on to more control to guard against "false rumours” sparking an all-engulfing prairie fire.
From my occidental perch, this always felt like an unsatisfactory explanation, but my presuppositions have since been tested. The pandemic, hastening a process of separation already underway, divided developed democratic societies into pro- and anti-vaccination/ masking/ lockdown silos, and instead of treating these as temporary shelters, both sides built up permanent military encampments. Once the pandemic faded into the background, losing its role as star attraction, those questioning the official narrative looked for new kindle for the flames, finding no short supply in Russia’s war on Ukraine, efforts by schools to make the learning environment more inclusive of LGBTQ+ students, the forest fires of recent months, and now the Hamas terrorist attack and what looks to be Israel’s coming invasion and destruction of Hamas-occupied Gaza.
I am of course no convert to the cause of speech codes and limited freedoms, but in times like these you can appreciate the problems they avoid, chief of which is a weakening of social cohesion at exactly the time when it would come in handy. A mechanism for ratcheting down the rhetoric also couldn’t hurt. Journalist Justin Ling, in a report titled ‘Far and Widening: The Rise of Polarization in Canada,’ tells of two confidentially-sourced Conservative MPs describing “a toxic feedback loop”:
As elected representatives, they are whipping up anger and distrust amongst their core supporters for money. Those supporters, in turn, are becoming increasingly fervent in their beliefs, distrustful of rival parties and demanding of ideological purity. To meet those members where they are means the party must in turn become more confrontational and dogmatic.
MPs deemed insufficiently loyal to the cause may face nomination challenges. Caucus members who don’t raise enough money or who fail to go sufficiently viral online are unlikely to be tapped for senior roles in the party. Worse yet, Conservatives labelled ideologically impure are likely to face social media backlash, a deluge of nasty emails, even death threats.
One Conservative MP said, bluntly, they have grown afraid of their own members.
The US has been ahead of their neighbour up north in this regard for some time and continues to break new ground. In early October, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy was removed from his position by eight rebel conservative Republicans for passing a stop-gap funding bill with help from Democrats to avoid a government shutdown. The American House of Representatives then spent much of October completely paralyzed through the inability of majority Republicans to select a new speaker, caught between its tin-foil MAGA wing and hitherto compliant moderates. The eventual choice, hardly a consensus pick, hints at further troubles. Louisiana representative Mike Johnson, a far-right Christian nationalist, was a key figure behind Trump’s ‘stop the steal’ movement and advanced a particularly ludicrous conspiracy theory that tied 2020 voting software with Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Just over the horizon lies potential economic peril, as a government shutdown is again threatened if a short-term spending measure is not passed by midnight on November 18th. In an environment where compromise is heresy, a way forward becomes increasingly difficult to broker.
Canada is not immune to these challenges. As the Bank of Canada increases interest rates, squeezing a middle class which was already living above its means by way of debt, a recession looms and the spectre of AI jolts creatives, blue-collar, and while-collar workers alike. “Canada is broken,” goes the phrase. What can be done? Unfortunately, due to exported American-style political polarization and the inflamed rhetoric found online (often encouraged by members of our attention-seeking and performative political class), answers acceptable to a sufficient majority are hard to come by. Problems which once seemed solvable now threaten to choke us out.
All these distracting fires, whether deliberately set or sparked through willful ignorance, make the task of governing challenging in the extreme. Short of a radical attitude change in society and government, and far-reaching legislation setting rules on social media companies and how they operate, it’s hard to see how one goes about putting the inferno out now. That should worry those of us who value our democratic inheritance.