In a salute to David Brooks’s latest column, I thought I’d join the ranks of conservatives and old people everywhere by writing a sassy little piece on the decline of morals in our corrupt society. To make the piece even more banal, I’ll start off with the recent current events cliches of Kanye West, Joe Wilson, and, you guessed it, Roman Polanski. We’ve departed quite far from Catiline’s purpose today.
The recent misdeeds (or attention thereto) of Kanye West, Joe Wilson, and Roman Polanski seem to share one thing in common: an arrogant contempt for rules and norms. In Kanye’s case, he decided that, although the VMA organizers had already come to their conclusions, and had decided in opposition to his own personal opinion, his own opinion carried sufficient weight and importance that, courtesy aside, it had to be made forcefully known, in such a way as to overshadow the decisions of the awards committee. Similarly, in Joe Wilson’s case, although decades of precedent and tradition had assigned another man, publicly elected by a system implicitly accepted by all law-abiding citizens of the country, the place and time to speak, is own interpretation of facts and events was of such weight and urgency that he had the right to violate precedent, tradition, and common courtesy to make his ideas known.
In just the same way, Roman Polanski, long ago, when he decided to flee our country and our justice system in so un-Socratic a way, decided that, although he had implicitly accepted the rules of our country for the duration of his stay here, his own skin was of sufficient importance that laws should be broken, flouted, and discarded according to his own personal sense of discretion.
(Perhaps my respect for the authorities in each of these cases is exaggerated… perhaps, in this, we see one of the very germs of conservatism: conservatives tend to respect authority, tradition, precedent, etc., while liberals are often inclined to be more… liberal… or humane to those who flout these precepts.)
I think it’s important to recognize that in each of these cases, the sense of personal arrogance and importance is the germ of radicalism. Radicalism is by definition any doctrine or system of thought that is predicated on the discarding of old rules and ideas. I do not mean, by the association of these rude individuals with radicalism, to disparage radicalism; nor do I mean to contemn these individuals (however much they ought to be contemned) by terming them radicals. There are situations where radicalism is appropriate. But to understand what these situations are, we must first understand what radicalism is, and how to recognize it.
Any time someone advocates the breaking of a serious law, as Roman Polanski did, they are advocating radicalism, because they are advocating that the existing system of laws, by containing whatever law that was the particular target of their disobedience, has become so corrupt that it is open to question by individual citizens. Making the law optional, only to be applied where individuals judge it appropriate, is essentially an invitation to anarchy.
Likewise, in polite society, one does not interrupt people; one does not upstage another person intentionally and rudely; one waits one’s turn and expresses one’s opinion calmly. To violate these rules is to leave the realm of polite society; it is to announce that one has knowledge so immediate, so manifest, and so important that no further discussion is merited, that no one else’s opinion need be heard. This is because if everyone behaved like this all the time, no conversation would be possible; hence, by convention, everyone avoid behaving like this all the time, so that conversation will always be possible, except in the aforementioned circumstances of immediate, critical, and manifest knowledge that must be communicated.
To clarify this last point, if Joe Wilson had been announcing that he had personal knowledge of a plot to assassinate the President in the next ten minutes, his interruption would have been merited. Indeed, if he had personal knowledge that the President had sworn an oath of fealty to Russia and was conducting a communist overthrow of the United States, his interruption would have been merited – for such information would be of such immediate concern, and so important, that it would bear immediate attention, especially in light of whose conversation he was interrupting. Many conservatives, I think, may be thinking to themselves, “But that’s exactly what he was doing.” It’s the third criterion that Joe Wilson lacked; the knowledge that he presented was not manifest; it was not incontrovertible or indisputable. It is in fact, still, weeks later, the opinion of many people that he himself was incorrect in what he said.
To repeat a point made earlier, there are situations when radicalism is appropriate, or at least logically consistent. For instance, green terrorists may appropriately be radicals. In their analysis, it is obvious that the Earth is headed for imminent catastrophe; the rest of us have ignored this fact despite its obviousness, and so we must be terrified into the action that will save us. In just the same way, Islamic terrorists believe that it is incontrovertible that the moral balance of the universe hangs on a precipice, and that they must take immediate action to save it. We can see that if we accept the premises of the green or Islamic terrorists, their actions make sense. They have obvious (to them) information; it is of supreme moral importance, and it is of such critical importance that it bears immediate action. We can – and do – dispute the epistemology, the methods by which these people have acquired their information and evaluated it, but we cannot dispute the logic of their actions.
Where radicalism becomes logically inconsistent is when it is applied to persuasion. When radicalism is manifested in what we might call an act of verbal terrorism, as per Joe Wilson or Kanye West, it breaks down. The object of Wilson’s action, and West’s if we may avoid extreme cynicism, was to persuade people. Since we, who they would persuade, are not radicals, it is clear that their information is not manifest to us. In fact, in both cases, it is mere opinion, unsubstantiated in any way by their own words. What they are really asking us to do, then, is to share in their own personal, mystic understanding of the Truth. But the attempt to communicate a mystic understanding is by definition impossible. If Kanye West really believes what he said, he should be out buying all of Taylor Swift’s CDs and burning them, only taking time to tell people about his beliefs during bathroom breaks. Likewise, Joe Wilson should be bombing hospitals or something.
So why is all of society doomed? Two points make a line; Joe Wilson, Kanye West, society. I see shades of radicalism in a lot of what is now called political discourse. Fox News is an excellent example of the unbalanced presentation of facts, the bad-faith arguments, and the shouting matches and disingenuous arguments that have come to characterize our discourse. No longer do we attempt to persuade, but to indoctrinate. By abandoning the normal methods by which people seek to attain the truth, media organizations like Fox have essentially accepted the premise that it is no longer necessary to question the truth; to them, it is obvious, no longer open to question. It is so obvious that the radical conditions apply; reasonable question and answer can be discarded, and we can use any artistry or ingenuity we have to get people to agree with us.
Posted by Catiline 
