In the wake of Ms Patel and Ms Clark’s article on ANU
student life in The
Australian and the wave of aggravated responses from the wider ANU
student community, I feel the need to pen something on the disposition of
people (perhaps our generation more than others) to react rapidly and
vehemently to anything that rubs them the wrong way. This disposition is unfortunate.
Admittedly, at least in my opinion, the Patel/Clark article
was not very good. It didn’t say anything particularly insightful, it
represented the views of a very specific clique (inter-state, metropolitan,
Burgmann law students with an eye on politics or journalism), dwelled very
little on the interesting points it did make, and contained a glaring typo—‘cognitive
dissidence’.
Nonetheless, I think it is totally inappropriate for people
to be as publically outraged by it as they have been. In the flood of opinion
following its publication nearly everything has been rather blunt, vicious and
vehement, where a bit of tongue in cheek satire might have more effectively
driven home the point without dragging anyone through the mud.
Everyone involved is a student, with big and fragile egos.
All the people who felt outraged and immediately cast a stone might consider the
similar feelings of distress those stones will cause their recipients. Unless,
or perhaps even if, someone has said something unconscionable, it is totally
unnecessary and counter-productive to dump a bucket of hate on them.
Buckets of hate aren’t very conducive to public discourse.
They discourage people from ever putting their thoughts out there, and they
shunt ‘discourse’ into ‘debate’ or ‘argument’. Both of these are things you try
and win rather than avenues for discussion, so inevitably end up with someone
hurt and with knowledge and social cohesion the only losers.
People take a very big leap when they put something in the
public domain, and it behooves us as Australians with a ‘have a go’ attitude to
not stomp all over that courage. (Perhaps Woroni could lead the charge by not
publishing replies to controversial pieces that are three times longer than the
original articles).
The backlash plugs into a smorgasbord
of worrying trends in Australian culture. First, we seem to think that public comment, and journalism by association, is inextricably linked to anger—you
can’t have an opinion unless it’s a fervent one, and you can’t conduct an
investigation of an issue without being ‘passionate’ about it. So
much of the backlash from ANU’s budding young writers reads like a Judith Sloan
article—petty and vindictive.
Of course sometimes you need really aggressive comment.
Tony Abbot’s statements about tax following BHP’s decision to put the Olympic
Dam project on ice needed to be beaten with the truth, and Leigh Sales did a fine job of
it. But in many other cases giving someone a hearing and allowing them to
present their case to their satisfaction will much better allow people to
assess the merits of their position. Aggression in public discourse puts people on the
defensive and encourages them to weasel away from the less-palatable aspects of
their positions. A
mellow approach to questioning gives someone enough space to outline in
full, with all the associated qualifiers, the good and the bad parts of their
position, and thereby allows the public to make a properly informed and fair
decision.
In the case of the Patel/Clark article, I think it would
have been much more profitable for the community if people had ‘explored’ their
reactions to the article and the themes it raised rather stuffing them in a
blunderbuss and pulling the trigger. This discussion is essentially one about
the identity of the ANU. We would do well to try to create a harmonious atmosphere
for it rather than a tribal one.
The second trend this relates to is the growing power of ‘offence’.
Everything seems to cause ‘offence’ nowadays, and the only response to offence
is outrage. As a consequence the ‘media’ increasingly constitutes opinion not
analysis, and our public discourse doesn’t give anything a hearing, only a
trial. Our response to outrage is to immediately confirm our bias in the flood
of acerbic commentary coming from ‘our team’, wallowing in mutual masturbation
rather than considering all the angles in play.
This trend obviously threatens a democratic polity’s ability
to be adequately informed about public policy questions because it makes everyone inclined to
distort facts and communicate in an inflammatory way. But more terrifyingly, it
leads to suggestions like Roxon’s ‘offence’ laws, which would seem to directly
impinge on free speech. Laws of this sort are trying to enforce civility, but
the long arm of the government is not appropriate for this end. Instead, we need
to grow thicker skins and acknowledge that the appropriate response to
something we disagree with is a calm, reasoned explanation of why. We all need
to be a little bit more fallibilist—the
foundation of academic manners.
The hostile response to ‘The ANU Obsession’ comes back to the
fragility of young adult identity and the tendency for youth to respond like a
wounded Rhino to anything that challenges their value systems. It is
understandable, but not okay. We should be better than that. We need to be
better than that. ANU produces a huge number of gatekeepers (‘leaders’) and
such people need to be level headed. Let’s take a collective chill pill.
I read both articles. The Patel/Clark article came across to me as one that is seeking attention, while the response to the article reads like a verbal attack on every single sentence made in the Patel/Clark article.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I have to say that these authors will grow in the way they write with age, and be more mellowed, constructive and critical in writing, rather than coming across as angry people with opinions.
That hardly sounds unfortunate! Thanks for reading as always.
ReplyDeletemmm, I certainly didn't see anything in the original article worth getting hot under the collar about. On the other hand, I don't think the cost-benefit equation comes out in favour of trawling through the responses to find out what was so aggravating.
ReplyDeleteNice article but Patel and Clark still deserve a bucket of hate! May it rain down on them hard
ReplyDeleteJust to point out your own 'glaring typo' mate: 'acerbic' and not 'ascerbic'. :P Good stuff on this - I have the utmost respect for Uma and Liv but the article in the Oz was not really much cop in my opinion!
ReplyDeleteHa! Thanks William. I actually checked that in the define function of google because it was coming up wrong in word, but google assumed I meant acerbic and I didn't notice that it had auto-changed my spelling. I've now amended.
ReplyDeleteTaking issue with something doesn't equal offence, but nor does taking offence mean endorsing coercion to restrict free speech. I'd hazard I think the long arm of government is useful in even fewer circumstances than you do, but responding to stupid, ridiculous, or offensive speech and labelling it as undesirable doesn't mean you endorse government. It's the capacity for societies to self-regulate speech in a marketplace of ideas that is actually the biggest point in favour of a guaranteed right to free speech. I'm really not sure why you're feeling the need to draw this long bow.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me like you're conflating criticism with taking 'offence' on a 'you hurt my feelings' level rather than a 'this is just a bad thing and society would be better off if its badness were exposed' level, which is what criticism actually is. I'd question your assertion that the majority of the commentary on this article was of the 'blah blah feelings' type. Pointing out that the piece ignored the perspectives of international students, or rural and regional students, or that people do choose to move to Canberra, or people who come here for the scientific research facilities, is not taking offence that requires growing a thicker skin. It's the very backbone of free speech.
I suppose you could argue that something so stupid doesn't need to be deconstructed for its facile nature to be obvious, but that's not really what you're doing in this blog post, is it? You're telling people to grow a thicker skin as though that's the take-away piece from this episode. It's really not.
Thanks for your comment Trisha. I always appreciate it when people take the time to write something long and involved. However, I think maybe you’re reading into what I say a little bit too much. At the very least, I certainly don’t ‘assert’ that most of the commentary was of the ‘blah blah blah feelings’ type. I don’t even think the piece implies that, but in these post-modern days the author’s views of their own piece aren’t very important [http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2012/apr/03/ian-mcewan-a-level-set-text-video].
ReplyDeleteIn my experience, most of the people who took ‘offence’ wrote a blah on Facebook and left it at that. The people who took the time to write longer commentaries (the ‘critical’ pieces) did indeed make quite reasonable points (like the ones you listed). However, in all the cases I’ve seen, the commentaries were written in an angry and vehement tone (Cameron’s status update being the only exception). I’d say this implies the author was offended, but leaving that aside, the anger and vehemence strikes me as an overblown response to the content of ‘The ANU Obsession’. I would argue that ‘overblown’ responses are increasingly common in public debate (which is why it is debate and not discourse), but you might disagree. My argument is that we do ourselves a disservice when we engage in public discourse in this manner. It encourages partisanship, the seeking of opinion rather than analysis, and shallow point scoring. At the very least, I would like to underline that you can criticise a piece without being nasty.
My argument is quite close to saying that society’s ability to ‘self-regulate speech in the marketplace of ideas’ is compromised by a tendency to be easily offended, and even more so by the tendency to write ‘criticism’ in an angry, vehement tone. Pointing things out is indeed the backbone of free speech, but I don’t see why doing so in an angry manner than encourages abuse is necessary.
I agree that the Roxon reference was a long bow. I was cogent of that as I was writing it. I do think the link exists, though establishing it could have waited for a more focused article. However, I do think, just based on what you've written above, that you might be downplaying the relationship between offence and threats to free speech. Offence to Islamists and the subsequent violent response compromised free speech in many instances in the wake of Denmark’s Prophet cartoons, and the writers for Woroni’s back page have frequently had to deal with requests for apologies and censorship in the wake of offensive material in the past (and not so recent past).
Finally, I’m not suggesting that the take away piece from this episode is that people should grow a thicker skin. I merely want to point that it’s something to be aware of. Does the piece really read like it has such a strong message? I’m just trying to lighten the mood, not highlight some meta-cultural phenomenon underwriting the saga. To go even further, I’m just trying to create an environment where the next time I write a controversial piece people don’t write their responses in a cloud of anger. Such responses tend to involve misrepresentations of their targets [http://markfabian.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/are-you-depressed-or-just-feeling-sad.html].