Intellectual Laziness and the Pundit

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death -Albert Einstein

I’ve never been a fan of punditry and I resent the appeal of the mercenary analysts that saturate our media. I’m not about to go into a diatribe about the famed left-wing media bias many conservatives like to complain about (conservatives have Fox News and you don’t get more conservative than that). Instead, I’m focused on the very notion of having someone do your thinking for you. I’ve seen it quite a bit in recent discussions—real life and online—and it’s gotten to the point that I’m rapidly losing interest in discussion.

That is, after all, what punditry is all about—thinking about and analyzing a given issue or group of issues so thoroughly for you that there’s nothing more to discuss. Oh, occasionally MSNBC or FOX will play the game of putting up a pundit from “the other side” to be massacred by “the truth” (lower case “t”—more on that in a second), but the truth is that they are there for show. None of them—conservative or liberal—actually believe you’re smart enough to figure out the truth on your own given the information so they don’t waste your time with it. Instead, they tell you the results.

And then they do it again.

And again.

And again.

And they tell you so many times in so many ways that you stop questioning how they came to the conclusions they have come to. The results are obvious. Of course school violence is on the rise. Of course DDT does more harm than any possible good it could do. Of course we need to spend more money on public education. Of course global warming is a fact, humanity is the cause, and we must take immediate and decisive action to stop it. Of course Iraq has WMD. Of course the President lied about those WMDs so he could get us into a war for [insert reason here—revenge, oil, prime contracts for us golf buddies].

Huh? What?

I could get into an inordinately long discussion on any or all of those topics I said above. I’ll bet my next paycheck most of you are railing about at least one, if not all of those topics, having lined up on one side or another. I’ll bet you are currently waiting to see where I go with this, unsure if you want to cheer me or jeer me. With a few keystrokes, I could set off a firestorm of argument.

But I won’t. Not going to do it. Not interested.

Why? Simple. Every time I get into one of these arguments, I get a regurgitation of the words of the pundit on that topic for one side or another. Independent thought seems to have gone by the wayside. Even the idea that someone is capable of independent thought seems to have disappeared into the abyss of sound bites and witticisms.

When I started posting to message boards outside of my writing and ventured into discussing things like politics, science, and religion, I was stunned (and often amused) by how many people would immediately attack me as a “Conservative” (capital “c”, more on that when I discuss Truth) and that meant I only thought “what FOX News tells [me] to think.” I think many people don’t know what to make of me. I often wear the Libertarian title just to put them at ease because no one knows what to do with you in American culture if they don’t know which pundit is doing your thinking for you. Of course, the title means nothing, in the end.

The importance of the capital letter
Being a conservative or a liberal is not a label or a political affiliation; it’s a philosophical perspective.

A conservative tends to want to keep things close to the status quo, taking changes slowly and deliberately to minimize the impact of unintended consequences (conservatives believe that there are always untended consequences). As such, you’ll typically find conservatives in staunch opposition to new laws or changing old laws without some clear reasoning and/or a demonstrated need. When it comes to government, conservatives tend to think that government is inherently incapable of accomplishing anything but a few functions—killing people, breaking things, and building roads. Oh! And collecting taxes. It would be fair to say that conservatives are pessimists (they’d say they’re realists).

If conservatives are pessimists, then liberals are optimists. They believe in progression—moving forward; growth. Stagnation, a liberal would likely tell you, is the most dangerous thing any society can experience. The government, to the liberal, is the personification of the power of unified will. The liberal knows that it is only through the consent of the governed that those who govern have power. The liberal generally celebrates government as a monument to the success of discordant voices finding consensus through debate and compromise. The liberal also believes in fair play. The liberal generally worries about power being consolidated in the hands of a few because they know that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

There are, of course, specifics about liberals and conservatives that are specific to different cultures. In America, for example, both liberals and conservatives acknowledge that mankind is inherently selfish. The American liberal would likely want to ensure that laws are in place to restrain that selfishness while the American conservative would likely want to let that selfishness loose upon the world and reap the benefits of that “enlightened self-interest.”

Now here’s the little-discussed Truth (yes, that’s truth with a capital “t”): liberalism and conservatism are both reasonable points of view. Two people can look at the same thing, see two different things, and both be right. There is nothing inherently wrong with the perspective of either philosophy and if people were intellectually honest with each other (or themselves, for that matter), we’d probably have a lot more people being able to “disagree without being disagreeable”, as Sen. Obama likes to say.

But it’s the Conservatives and the Liberals that are the problem. Conservatives and Liberals don’t care about the Truth. They don’t care about the philosophical differences. They don’t acknowledge each other’s positions, let alone allow for the possibility that one of them might be right. They attach themselves to political parties and candidates—Conservatives to the Republican Party and Liberals to the Democratic Party—like leeches on a hippopotamus’ rump. These are the intellectually lazy. When things go badly in their camp, they salivate for their pundit to come out and tell them what to say to fight back.

I’m always amused when I see Conservatives arguing about the war in Iraq because they’re really in a pickle—some Conservative pundits are calling for withdrawal, going where the tide is taking them, and others are saying we need to finish what we started. How are they supposed to support the party when they don’t know what to think?

I was equally amused when someone pointed out Al Gore’s hypocrisy in using 20 times more energy in a month than most Americans use in a year while traveling in his private jet to give lectures on reducing carbon emissions in our daily lives. For an entire news cycle, the Conservatives were having at the issue and no Liberal pundits were firing back (poor guys got caught off-guard. You need at least a news cycle to prepare your response and test it before you go public with it). Then, within a day, the prepackaged thought parcels were delivered and life could resume as normal—Mr. Gore buys carbon offsets and he’s consolidated his office into his home, etc.

In the end, punditry wins. Hired intellectual chefs, ready to cook you up a prepared thought at a moment’s notice, stand by patiently for your order. What should you think about welfare reform? Well, are you ordering from the Conservative or the Liberal side of the menu?

I think I’ll cook for myself, thank you very much.