On the occasional need for polemic writing
I’ve always remembered a quote from Flannery O’Connor, the great author from the American South. O’Connor wrote interesting tales fused with themes of ethics and morality. Her characters often struggled with prickly issues of the Civil Rights era like prejudice, racism and the waning influence of religion. Often, her stories would take a dramatic twist at the end that would shock her audiences. In the short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” for instance, a genteel family on a road trip are murdered by nihilist criminals on the final page.
Her quote occurs to me whenever I read or see anything that people respond to with shock and disbelief. She told an interviewer once:
When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.
I thought of her words again today when I read Mona Eltahawy’s article “Why do they hate us?” which details her perception of the mass mistreatment of Arab women.
Regarding freedom of expression
From “On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill:
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
Eric Hoffer on proselytizing
Eric Hoffer’s an interesting figure. Many observers consider the U.S. author’s book The True Believer
Chapter 88, for instance, contains some interesting thoughts on the urge to proselytize. He’s speaking broadly about any movement that obsesses over how to convert others. When I read it, I tend to think about fundamentalist religious believers (including atheists) and extreme political partisans, both left and right.
Here’s the entire chapter (without the footnotes for the quotes):
Whence comes the impulse to proselytize?Intensity of conviction is not the main factor which compels a movement to spread its faith to the four corners of the earth: “Religions of great intensity often confine themselves to contemning, destroying, or at best pitying what they see in themselves.” Nor is the impulse to proselytize an expression of an overabundance of power which as Bacon has it “is like a great flood, that will be sure to overflow.”
The missionary zeal seems rather an expression of some deep misgiving, some pressing feeling of insufficiency at the center. Proselytizing is more a passionate search for something not yet found than a desire to bestow upon the world something we already have. It is a search for a final and irrefutable demonstration that our absolute truth is indeed the one and only truth.
The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his own faith by converting others. The creed whose legitimacy is most easily challenged is likely to develop the strongest proselytizing impulse. It is doubtful whether a movement which does not profess some preposterous and patently irrational dogma can be possessed of that zealous drive which “must either win men or destroy the world.”
It is also plausible that those movements with the greatest inner contradiction between profession and practice — that is to say with a strong feeling of guilt — are likely to be the most fervent in imposing their faith on others. The more unworkable communism proves in Russia, and the more its leaders are compelled to compromise and adulterate the original creed, the more brazen and arrogant will be their attack on a non-believing world.
The slaveholders of the South became the more aggressive in spreading their way of life the more it became patent that their position was untenable in a modern world. If free enterprise becomes a proselytizing holy cause, it will be a sign that its workability and advantages have ceased to be self evident.
The passion for proselytizing and the passion for world dominion are both perhaps symptoms of some serious deficiency at the center. It is probably as true as a band of apostles or conquistadors as it is of a band of fugitives setting out for a distant land that they escape from an untenable situation at home. And how often indeed do the three meet, mingle and exchange their parts.
Makes sense. I once had “some deep misgivings” at my core. Those who knew me can attest that I often tried to proselytize my friends (and anyone else who would listen) toward my conservative politics and atheistic viewpoint. So, maybe Hoffer’s onto something here. Luckily, I don’t feel the need to convince my readers of this belief.
How to write good
“Do not put statements in the negative form. And don’t start sentences with a conjunction. If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do. Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all. De-accession euphemisms. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Last, but not least, avoid clichés like the plague.”
– William Safire
On Journalism
“With many young reporters the notion exists that a newspaper man is not at his best unless he is finding fault. They go out of their way to employ ridicule and sarcasm, and pride themselves on their ability to annoy and hurt. Some of them get so bad that they are always ready to stretch the truth for the sake of setting down what they think are particularly telling examples of their own smartness; and it must be confessed that occasionally experienced newspaper men who pose as fair judges are the worst offenders.”
On laughter
“Nothing shows a man’s character more than what he laughs at.”
On Work
From Marge Piercy’s poem “To be of use“:
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
Manipulating the media
Here’s a great example of how an advocacy groups with a good PR team can easily influence the press. The same headline about health insurance woes appears in 200 different newspapers.
Walter Lippmann pointed this out in 1922:
For the practice of appealing to the public on all sorts of intricate matters means almost always a desire to escape criticism from those who know by enlisting a large majority which has had no chance to know. The verdict is made to depend on who has the loudest or the most entrancing voice, the most skillful or the most brazen publicity man, the best access to the most space in the newspapers. For even when the editor is scrupulously fair to “the other side,” fairness is not enough. There may be several other sides, unmentioned by any of the organized, financed and active partisans.
On defending the ethics of journalism
Every journalist who is not stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns — when the article or book appears — his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and the “public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.
– “The Journalist and the Murderer,” Janet Malcolm
On knowledge
Here’s a great quote from Shakespeare:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
– “Hamlet”, Act 1 scene 5
When he says philosophy, he’s talking about science.
