Listening Through the Noise

I hate this article on public discourse by Jon Lovett. I like it when I hate an article. It's a kind of high praise. It means the author says enough to elicit that kind of response from me. There is some smart stuff in the article, and it's funny in all the right places. But I do hate it.

Like the author, I am also afraid that our current public discourse is too black and white.

But I disagree with the solution presented here. The author writes:

We need to learn to live with the noise and tolerate the noise even when the noise is stupid, even when the noise is offensive, even when the noise is at times dangerous. Because no matter how noble the intent, it’s a demand for conformity that encourages people on all sides of a debate to police each other instead of argue and convince each other. And, ultimately, the cycle of attack and apology, of disagreement and boycott, will leave us with fewer and fewer people talking more and more about less and less.

It sounds nice. I agree part of the problem is a “cycle of attack and apology, of disagreement and boycott.” And I love this quote that describes the result of that cycle: “What’s left is the pressure to sand down the corners of your speech while looking for the rough edges in the speech of your adversaries.”

But the solution presented here is not an actual solution.

Lovett wants people to stop reacting so rashly to things that offend. He claims “we can live with the noise, even embrace the noise, without trying to drown each other out.”

But that won’t work, because the rash reactions he wants us to curtail – those are part of the noise Lovett wants us to embrace.

We can’t ask people to stop reacting – to stop being offended – while simultaneously supporting the right to offend. They are both speech acts, and if you want to support one, then you have to support the other.

I came to this realization while reading one of Lovett’s main supporting points. He uses the brief tenure of Brenden Eich as the CEO of Mozilla as an example of the “cycle of attack and apology.” It’s the most recent example of what Lovett describes as “people who were told [via the public discourse] to shut up.”

I’ll agree, there was a strong reaction to Eich’s appointment, but no one told him to shut up.

The CEO is the public face of a company. It is a position unlike other executive positions. That person is being asked to represent a company’s ideals and philosophy to investors and customers. It is a difficult and very public job, but that is the job you are giving to someone when you make them CEO.

No one told Eich to shut up. People said, “If Mozilla is going to appoint a CEO who contributed money to a cause we think is discriminatory, then Mozilla is saying that is part of their company’s philosophy.” No one expressed that view while Eich was serving as the company’s CTO from 2005-2014, and that is because CEO is a very different position – a very public position in comparison to CTO.

People had a strong reaction because a person who holds a view they find offensive was elevated to a highly public position.

That reaction is part of the noise Lovett is asking us to embrace.

You don’t have to agree with Eich or the people at OKCupid.

But it is not okay to ask one of them to sit back and listen, to “live with the noise.”

The solution is not to halt the strong reactions. The solution is to pay more attention to the smart reactions.

The human act of perceiving sound is astounding, not because we silence extraneous noise, but because our mind is able to pick out and interpret one distinct sound while our ears are assaulted by a cacophony of noise.

That should be our goal as we listen to public discourse.